painters
fisun.guner
Sitting for Lucian Freud was quite a commitment. Unlike Hockney, whom he painted and who painted him, Freud was a very slow painter and he was methodical. Paying close attention to detail and absorbed by different textures, he was intent on building up surfaces meticulously, layer upon layer. This meant that sessions would usually go on for several months, sometimes years. And because Freud felt that their presence affected the surrounding space, like the ripple effect on water, he even required his sitters to continue to sit for him even if he was occupied with painting the crumbling plaster Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Turner and the Elements is a visual joy and an intellectual pleasure. The backbone of the selection is Turner’s genuine engagement with the scientists of the day. The argument is that he amalgamated the traditional segregation of the elements – earth, air, fire and water – into a fusion of all four; that technically, instead of schematic compositions divided into discernable sections and monocular viewpoints, he painted, so to speak, from the centre out.Turner first briefly came to Margate as an 11-year-old London schoolboy. Then as now sea air was considered a good thing. In the Read more ...
fisun.guner
In one small room of the Freud Museum, which was once the home of Sigmund in the last year of his life, are the works Jane McAdam Freud made in the final months of her father’s life. Below an imposing photograph of Freud the elder, the progenitor of the clan, are two detailed, tender sketches of Lucian in profile. In the right sketch the dying artist stares resolutely ahead, his gaze, coupled with the firm set of his jaw, capturing a sense of absolute stillness. The left sketch shows the artist now more gaunt, eyes closed, in death, we imagine, or possibly just asleep. Perhaps much more Read more ...
fisun.guner
Featuring over 100 galleries specialising in modern and contemporary British art, the London Art Fair is a January highlight for those who prefer a more relaxed atmosphere to that offered by the international VIP frenzy of Frieze. From the great names of the 20th century to leading contemporary artists and emerging talent, the fair offers a tantalising showcase on a huge variety of British art.It’s ideal for both buyer and browser. In addition to the main fair, you’ll find solo shows and curated group displays in the Art Projects section, while Photo50 is an exciting display of contemporary Read more ...
fisun.guner
Last year, like every year, is a bit of a blur. I saw a lot, but all the good stuff seems to have clustered near the end. Maybe an end-of-year cultural bloat has finally settled. Anyway, to help jog the memory, I think I should start bottom-up. Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan (National Gallery, until 5 February) is a good place to kick off. It was always going to be the show that would get the most protracted drumroll, but with only nine paintings by the Renaissance Master himself and two questionable attributions, was it really all that in the flesh? Well, I can Read more ...
fisun.guner
Graham Sutherland and George Shaw have two things in common. They are both painters and both are associated with Coventry: Sutherland made his famous altarpiece work – a tapestry – for the city’s rebuilt cathedral, while Shaw grew up in Coventry’s Tile Hill, a housing estate that’s become familiar to us through Shaw’s beautiful and melancholy Humbrol enamel oil paintings.But other than these tenuous connections, you may find little common ground between the pair. Sutherland’s imagery reaches back to the 19th-century Romantic tradition through painters such as Samuel Palmer, whilst his Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Here be wonderful images, in an anthology of two score of paintings and drawings from the 1950s through the mid-Nineties by 10 artists whose shared interests only sharpen their individuality. Francis Bacon is the autodidact in the group, which includes two Berliners – Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud – who came to England as children. David Hockney is the witty, adventurous northerner who has now returned, mostly, to Yorkshire from a life lived between London and Los Angeles. Patrick Caulfield is primarily concerned with vibrant still lifes and domestic interiors, Euan Uglow and William Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the 1450s in Florence, Alberti was working on the facade of Santa Maria Novella, Donatello and Fra Filippo Lippi were active, while Leonardo was born in nearby village of Vinci. And the English established a diplomatic presence. It has continued almost uninterrupted, pausing only in times of direct conflict. This month, it ends as the British consulate closes its doors for the last time. Cuts to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office budget and global geopolitical shifts mean that the United Kingdom no longer needs a man in Florence to tend to the needs of tourists and expats. It is an Read more ...
mark.hudson
How can you review LS Lowry? The Salford rent-collector-cum-painter simply did what he did: sending his bendy, pipe-cleaner people through white-floored industrial streets, in scenes that seemed hardly to change in decades. While Lowry fully qualifies for that currently fashionable status "outsider artist", there’s nothing remotely edgy about him. He’s as cuddly and quintessentially English as Thora Hird. Anyone likely to have an opinion on him will long since have formed it. Everyone else will simply be indifferent.While the Cornish primitive Alfred Wallis, with whom Lowry has obvious Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In his catalogue essay, Peter Osborne discusses the meaning of epithets such as “new” and “contemporary” when applied to current art, yet no one in this year’s New Contemporaries seems to be striving to make work that is “new”, “different”, “radical”, “challenging”, “avant-garde” or even “eye-catching” – to name just a few of the attributes supposed to make an artwork significant, relevant or desirable. As a result, this show of work by recent graduates is remarkably free of melodrama, posturing, narcissism, self-pity or self-importance – tedious qualities so often found in recent art. Read more ...
fisun.guner
For dull reasons to do with a dodgy digital box and a very old analogue telly, I can’t tune in to BBC Four during live transmissions, so I either catch up on iPlayer, or (lucky me as a journalist) get to see programmes early. But I’m very glad I can get it at all, for when the BBC cuts come to pass and its premier arts channel starts broadcasting archive-only material, as it proposes to do, then I think I might just stop watching telly altogether.This is because everything, but everything, that the BBC stands for is encapsulated by BBC Four’s original programming. And in the visual arts it Read more ...
fisun.guner
Leonardo da Vinci was not a prolific artist. In a career that lasted nearly half a century, he probably painted no more than 20 pictures, and only 15 surviving paintings are currently agreed to be entirely his. Of these, four are incomplete. Indeed one painting, abandoned by the artist but currently hanging in the National Gallery, is so far from being finished that the two figures in it, that of Saint Jerome and the lion in the wilderness (c 1488-90, Pinacoteca Vaticana, pictured below), have been barely touched by paint.Yet the aged saint’s musculature, the way the taut sinews of his Read more ...