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Art

Symbolism in art

Recently I watched a programme called Decoding Turner in which a mechanical engineer and his wife advanced a theory that in Turner’s famous The Fighting Temeraire, on the prow of the vessel was concealed a picture of Napoleon. The art historian Andrew Graham Dixon peered at the picture and [...]

September 13, 2023 // 0 Comments

Artist talking about themselves

My late father – no mean watercolourist but above all a fine preceptor of humanity – once observed of a painter he knew: “I don’t think he is much good but he is very good at talking about his art “ Talking about art and doing it are two different skills. Picasso mixed with a [...]

August 30, 2023 // 0 Comments

Farleys House & Lee Miller

Sussex is well blessed with places of the arts to visit. I have visited and reviewed Charleston, the Bloomsbury outpost where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant painted and had a brief affaire, and Batemans – the home of Rudyard  Kipling at Alfreston. By bad luck my planned trip to Farley Farm [...]

August 11, 2023 // 0 Comments

A la Colthard/Eating out in Chichester.

Chichester is renowned for its cathedral, theatre and art gallery – but not its restaurants. I accompanied Alice (Mansfield) on Tuesday to the Pallant Gallery.  I enjoyed the Gwen John exhibition and particularly her draughtmanship. Can one use that word now or should it be [...]

August 3, 2023 // 0 Comments

Gwen John/Art and Life in London and Paris/Pallant Gallery

Most art critics are women and most of these carry a feminist agenda which runs that female artists  were oppressed and unrated by their male counterparts. Thus, the conventional narrative is that Gwen John’s more celebrated younger brother Augustus deliberately overshadowed her career though he [...]

August 2, 2023 // 0 Comments

Thunderclap & The Man who made Vermeers

Thunderclap by Observer Art Critic Laura Cumming is the story of the life and death of Dutch 17th century artist Carel Fabritius. In fact much more is known about his death in 1654 when his house collapsed after a gunpowder  depot explosion in Delft. As for his life, he was born in the village of [...]

July 25, 2023 // 0 Comments

After Impressionism

Yesterday I went to the After Impressionism exhibition at the National Gallery and was underwhelmed. Perhaps this was caused by waiting in the rain in the entrance queue; or the fact that I knew virtually every picture so the impact was lost; perhaps I could not see for whom the exhibition had been [...]

July 15, 2023 // 0 Comments

John Minton

Yesterday I watched a recording of Mark Gatiss’ appreciation of the artist Johnny Minton (1917-57) on BBC4. You may not have heard of him and therefore be surprised to learn that in the 1950s he was as well known as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. He was the life and soul of the party, an active [...]

July 12, 2023 // 0 Comments

A la Colthard/Boccaccio and la Colombe d’Or

The past few days I have visited two of my favourite restaurants: Boccacio in the centre of Nice (rue Masséna) and la Colombe d’or in St. Paul de Vence, a 30 minute drive outside Nice. I walked straight past Boccacio because – as I remembered it – it never had an open air street [...]

April 14, 2023 // 0 Comments

Sussex Landscape/chalk, wood and water

This exhibition does very much what it says on the tin by sticking to landscapes of Sussex in water colours, chalk and woodcuts. It features artists who came to Sussex to paint – like Turner – and those who made their home in this most attractive of counties – John Constable, Ivon [...]

March 11, 2023 // 0 Comments

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