I always learn something from the regular Sotheby’s Selects emails. This month the focus is on Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights c.1490-1505. Here, I’m adding a little to Sotheby’s excellent summary. This reminds us that Bosch’ triptych starts closed to display the third day of the Biblical formation of the earth . The left wing …
I was excited to go to the Barbican exhibitions of Dorothea Lange and Vanessa Winship‘s photography. But what I found out is the Politics of Seeing can be just as rotten as any other Politics. Lange has been described as “principled .., a heroine of the lens“. After her most famous photo, Migrant Mother, was …
What tremendously thoughtful fun I had meandering round Birkbeck with a black mirror, gazing into a fairy ball! Sheila Ghelani had designed our route by placing one of the mirrors she’d created onto a map: we were going to meander around the black hole thus created. Decked out with palm-size pebbles of mirrors in black …
What can we learn from how we look at Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi? I’m really interested in how we look at things. I already mentioned the Mona Lisa as an example of something that maybe we look at in the same way every time. I compared this with the ‘art’ on 15th and 16th century mosques …
Collodion underpinned the birth of art photography. Some of this was shown in the 2018 NPG exhibition on Victorian Giants. I’m mainly working digitally now – but collodion offers a much more physical process. You’re not going to take scores of shots and spend time picking the best one. And you can’t just press undo …
As I washed my dad’s dead body, I thought of how much of a Cycle of Life there is. How life cycles on and on. My dad must have washed me when I was a baby: his first child. I freshened him up through his time in the hospice. Just because he died, I wasn’t going to stop washing …
This digital collage is about what happened to my dad’s heartbeat when he took his last breath. I’m showing the sound and light and movement during the multimedia performance in the Showroom gallery. The image shows a colleague clapping my dad’s heartbeat (on the left) and me talking (on the right). On either edge are (white on …
This digital collage of Deathbed Skiing shows me talking into, walking and standing alongside one of the Showroom Korean ‘machines’ that underpinned ‘Dawn Breaks’ (the ‘story bus’). The words I said are here. When my dad was so near death that he’d stopped talking, he got out of his bed. People that close to death don’t get out of …
This is a very brief summary of my Praxis Forum submission. Praxis Forum put out an open call for visual artists who are interested in collaboration and in pushing the boundaries of their artistic practice. Applications from disabled artists were especially welcome. There is to be a year-long programme of monthly peer mentoring forums, including peer crits, discussions, …
The current painting and poetry exhibition at the Poetry Society draws on Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal. Zoe Benbow (visual artist) and Sarah Corbett (poet) have collaborated on a reverie about women doing local walking in the landscape. The exhibition is about an inner world with inner landscapes. I went to an inspirational workshop on this. …