To plant a tree: a love song to a magnolia planted thirty years ago
Sitting in a darkening room yesterday as evening came on, I sensed snowflakes falling beyond the window. Torn by a western wind and rain that had fallen throughout the day, the falling shards of...
View ArticlePublic View: celebrating 300 years of the Bluecoat
The Bluecoat is 300 years old. Miraculously, the oldest building in Liverpool city centre has twice survived the threat of destruction (post-war city planners thought it would be a great idea to...
View ArticleYves Klein at Liverpool Tate: vision of cosmic infinity – or a crock of shit?
In 1961, Piero Manzoni filled ninety tin cans with his own excrement. A label on each can identified the contents as ‘Artist’s Shit’, contents 30gr net freshly preserved, produced and tinned in May...
View ArticleAn Adrian Henri mini-exhibition: ‘The poet in him wrote poems containing...
I received an email from the Victoria Gallery & Museum alerting me to the fact that an exhibition of work by Adrian Henri was ending that day. Henri has a special place in my heart because I...
View ArticleJohn Berger: 90 years of looking, listening and seeing (re-post)
Until I have time to gather my thoughts in response to the death of John Berger – here is a re-post of my appreciation to mark his 90th birthday in November. (Avoid at all costs the mean-spirited...
View ArticlePaul Nash at Tate Britain: searching for a different angle of vision
Paul Nash first discovered Wittenham Clumps, two ‘dome-like hills’ in Oxfordshire with a ‘curiously symmetrical sculptural form’ in 1911. Between 1912 and 1946 he would paint them repeatedly as he...
View ArticleForest, Field & Sky: Art out of Nature
We approached Forest, Field & Sky: Art out of Nature, last night’s documentary on BBC Four presented by Dr James Fox, with great anticipation since its subject was a form of art that has inspired...
View ArticleVan Gogh: from the dark into the light
After encountering the artists of the Hague School in the Rijksmuseum, I walked across Museumplein to the Van Gogh Museum where I found further evidence of the connections between these painters. There...
View ArticleOut and about with the Hague School
I guess we’re all familiar with the way in which the French Impressionists shook up the art world in the 1870s by depicting landscapes and scenes from modern everyday life often painted outdoors using...
View ArticleVermeer’s ‘Little Street’ Discovered!
It’s one of my favourite paintings. A view of ordinary houses in an ordinary street, the weathered brickwork, window leads and wooden shutters finely detailed, and a few incidental details of everyday...
View ArticleHieronymus Bosch: visions of Hell and earthly delights in an astonishing...
The first picture that you see when you enter the exhibition, Hieronymus Bosch: Visions of Genius, at Noordbrabants Museum in the painter’s home town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch depicts a careworn traveller...
View ArticleHieronymus Bosch back in his old home town
After dark in the old town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, it’s easy to imagine that I am walking in the footsteps of Hieronymus Bosch. For even though he died 500 years ago, the street plan is unchanged from the...
View ArticleMatisse in Focus at Tate Liverpool: The Snail’s last outing
Matisse in Focus at Tate Liverpool brings together fifteen paintings from the Tate collection to provide an overview of the artist’s work across five decades. Its centrepiece is The Snail, the largest...
View ArticleDavid Jones: Vision and Memory at Pallant House
There’s a self-portrait David Jones painted in 1931 when he was in his mid-thirties. In Human Being he depicts himself almost as a boy, an unworldly youth with a thoughtful, quizzical look in his eyes...
View ArticleAi Weiwei at the RA: Everything is art. Everything is politics
Ai Weiwei’s work is not unusual in drawing upon the artist’s own life experience for inspiration, but there is none of the solipsism of Tracey Emin’s Bed in his art. Ai Weiwei’s installations,...
View ArticleCelts: Art and Identity
The other day I received an email advising me of the line-up for the next Celtic Connections in Glasgow. But who were the Celts – these people who now lend their name to a festival that ‘celebrates...
View ArticlePeter Lanyon: Soaring Flight
During the 1950s, the small harbour town of St Ives in Cornwall played host to an astonishing group of painters that included some of the leading modern artists of the time. Among them were Alan Davie,...
View ArticleAntony Gormley: Being Human
Alan Yentob’s film for the BBC’s Imagine strand last week made a powerful case for Anthony Gormley being one of the most original and profound of British artists at work today. In Antony Gormley: Being...
View ArticleBruegel in Vienna, part 3: ‘Peasant’ Bruegel
So far this in this series of posts celebrating the Bruegel room in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, I have looked at Bruegel’s paintings of the seasons and the works which share a preoccupation...
View ArticleBruegel in Vienna, part 2: Religion, politics and war
In the first part of this appreciation of the Bruegel room in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, I looked at Bruegel’s paintings of the seasons. This time I want to explore a group of paintings...
View Article