Tag Archive | painting
Looking at the View: ‘take the small voyage out to the horizon and back again’
Visiting Tate Britain last week we found that the painters and decorators were in and rooms closed – there’s a major re-hang going on that will be completed in May, with the promised result that we will be able to follow the story of British Art chronologically from 1540 to present day. I can see […]
Kurt Jackson’s sketchbooks: the soul of a place
In my previous post, writing about John Constable’s oil sketches, I noted how he would make meticulous notes of the weather conditions at the time he painted. I remarked that this reminded me of Kurt Jackson, who does exactly the same thing – often including the observation in the title of a painting, and sometimes […]
The Meaning of Trees
Who would have thought that the dark grey shapes in a pack of dog biscuits are derived from willow ash, a product which aids digestion and reduces flatulence? This was just one of the fascinating insights offered by Fiona Stafford, Professor of Literature at Somerville College Oxford, in a series of Radio 3 essays last week […]
Kurt Jackson: Catch the Light
Kurt Jackson paints: seascapes in which every glitter of reflected light on the water’s surface is detailed; rivers in their varied moods and waterside shades of greenery; and trees in their many forms and patterning of light and shade. His paintings are meticulous in their observation of the details in a landscape, yet they are, […]
Steve des Landes: a mysterious and personal vision
I’ve been to see Sealed, a new solo exhibition by local artist Steve des Landes at the View Two Gallery on Liverpool’s Mathew Street. It’s a superb show, featuring a number of large canvases and two series of smaller ones, all produced during an intense period of inspiration in the last year or so. Alongside […]
A Lowry Summer in an autumn deluge
‘You never see the sun in my work … because I can’t paint shadows. I kept trying for years’. So said LS Lowry. But, in Salford on Tuesday to see A Lowry Summer, the exhibition mounted by The Lowry to mark the artist’s 125th birthday year, I thought maybe the real reason was that the […]
Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings
In my appreciation of Robert Hughes the other day, I quoted Hughes as maintaining that the purpose of art is ‘to be beautiful. To manifest beauty. People need beauty. There’s a hunger for it’. Well, there’s plenty of beauty on show at Tate Liverpool’s exhibition Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings, and, judging by the throngs […]
Man with a Blue Scarf: conversation, silence and time
I’ve been reading Martin Gayford’s account of having his portrait painted by Lucian Freud – Man with a Blue Scarf. Gayford – whose previous book, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney I described in an earlier post as one of the best books on art that I have read – has done it again, […]
Helen Clapcott: where two rivers meet
While I’m on about painting Stockport’s viaduct, I must mention a local artist who has painted it repeatedly in recent years in wonderful paintings that record Stockport’s urban landscape, often with the Mersey snaking sinuously between the viaduct’s pillars, the mills, motorways and derelict sites of the town. Her name is Helen Clapcott and, although […]
Lowry in Stockport
When I reached Stockport on the Mersey walk the other day, I took a stroll around the town and ended up in the Art Gallery on Wellington Road where a new exhibition had just opened. Street Scene: Artworks from Stockport’s Art Collection features the work of well-known artists with local connections such as L.S. Lowry, […]
