The answer must be that art motivates me. Here I am testing ideas and prejudices about the supposed rivalries between great artists! This might be the reason that I am here anticipating a trip to London today (20th August 2025) to look again at Jenny Saville at the National Portrait Gallery and to see a … More Art is a great motivator and a comprehensive one: my London trip today.
It is almost compulsory to describe the effect of art as achieved ‘beauty’. We use ‘beauty’ too often in this respect. The words that come to me as I reflect on an attempt to reconnect with the art of Andy Goldsworthy are precarity, structural fragmentation or decay, fragility and ephemerality, so how has his lasted … More Look not for ‘beauty’ but ‘precarity, structural fragmentation or decay, fragility and ephemerality’. This blog is based on a visit to the National Galleries of Scotland’s exhibition ‘Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years’ on the 11th August 2025.
Retrospecting on Edward Burra: This blog reflects on visiting the wonderful exhibition at Tate Britain, London Millbank, on 9th July 2025. I am building a large Edward Burra library. Though some items are rather shabby reading copies such as the Andrew Causey Edward Burra: Complete Catalogue and the Jane Stevenson biography of the artist, the content … More Retrospecting on Edward Burra: This blog reflects on visiting the wonderful exhibition at Tate Britain, London Millbank, on 9th July 2025.
‘… the name dear me the name was the same it was Rose and under Rose was Willy and under Willy was Billie. / It made Rose feel very funny it really did’. [0] The Ethics of name-dropping and innuendo finding in Gertrude Stein’s (1939) The World Is Round London, B.T. Batsford Ltd. I have … More ‘… the name dear me the name was the same it was Rose and under Rose was Willy and under Willy was Billie. / It made Rose feel very funny it really did’. The propriety and ethics of name-dropping (and innuendo finding) in Gertrude Stein’s (1939) ‘The World Is Round’ London, B.T. Batsford Ltd.
In what follows, I scatter the correctly paired works variously in labeled collages: Barbara Hepworth Winter Solstice at ItDibs Hepworth’s idealistic iconography certainly extended to her self-portrait. The use of blank space on paper characterises the treatment of her massive forehead, full of space which her abstract figuration also has, wherein colour tones and shades … More The quiz of yesterday (after I lost faith in its fun): the answers.
Me as a more-than-tubby queer angel. The title of this piece is a bit presumptuous. Too few read this blog, and very much fewer respond (though I am grateful for those who do feedback their thoughts either personally or in public) to assume anyone either wants me to set them a little experimental exercise or … More Have a go at this exercise! I dare you! It is an exercise on whether we can use terms used in talking about art, in this using the term ‘style’ alone, to recognise a artist’ s work.
I first saw this painting painted about 1950 at an Eardley retrospective at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art in a Joan Eardley retrospective called ‘A Sense of Place’ in 2017. Though often reduced to statements of the ‘strong identification with the poor and deprived’ type, these paintings do not seem to me to call … More ‘Street Kids’ Joan Eardley (c. 1950): Townhead in Glasgow
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