art
Caratacus, Caradog, Caractacus
If Calgacus might be thought of as the earliest known anti-imperialist Scotland has produced, Wales has some claim on an earlier native leader of resistance to the Roman occupation of Britain, Caratacus. He’s a figure well worth excavating, as an historical character and as a focus of myth-making in the centuries since his time. 1 […]
‘Sweet sister death has gone debauched today’: artists and writers in Mametz Wood
Mametz Wood: three syllables that have lost none of their power to appal, after almost a hundred years. On 7 July 1916 the infantrymen of the 38th or Welsh Division, most of them volunteers and amateur soldiers, were ordered to make a frontal assault on a German-held line in front of a wood, roughly a […]
Whistler’s long voyage: Rotherhithe to Battersea
‘Whistler and the Thames’, which comes to an end at the Dulwich Picture Gallery on 12 January, is the best sort of exhibition: one that places right in front of your retina an artist previously spotted only with peripheral vision. James McNeill Whistler was born in Lowell, Mass. in 1834, moved with his family to […]
Angst and the void: Vienna portraits and Mira Schendel
Two London exhibitions, two very different ways of presenting and seeing art: ‘Facing the modern: portraits in Vienna 1900’ at the National Gallery, and ‘Mira Schendel’ at Tate Modern. We all think we know about art in Vienna in the decades immediately before the First World War. Politics: a rickety, arthritic empire waiting to be […]
London: scene of flight, scene of destruction
Fleeing from the noise and heat of the midday traffic we took our sandwiches to a bench in a small public garden off Marylebone High Street. What we’d chanced upon was the site of the old St Marylebone church, across the road from its 1817 replacement. Nothing remains of the first three churches (the current […]
The strange death of the male necktie
I’ve been looking through my ties lately, as part of a more general, quasi-Buddhist ‘do I really need these any longer?’ investigation. It’s a heterogeneous collection of the long and the short, the dark and the light, the sober and the ‘look at me’, the narrow and the absurdly wide. Reviewing them set me thinking […]
Edgar Degas and the art of ironing
Ironing clothes is one of the small but rewarding pleasures of life. I tend to do it in the kitchen on a Sunday morning, when the sun falls on the ironing board and good music comes from the radio. Smoothing creases in cotton always has a calming effect on the mind. Occasionally the regular passage […]
Peter Lord: iconographer / iconoclast
On 23 May in the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea Peter Lord gave an illustrated talk as part of the launch of his new book Relationships with pictures: an oblique autobiography (Parthian, 2013). It was a remarkable performance. As ever with Peter you couldn’t fail to be aware of the depth of feeling underlying his […]
Swansea Met fine art degree show 2013
When they get towards the end of their courses most undergraduates prove themselves in the private silence of the exam hall. Art students are different. Their end-of-year work is brutally laid bare, on gallery display for all to see – examiners, peers and public. If you belong to the latter group, how should you approach […]
Ron Lawrence
In Oriel y Bont, Pontypridd there’s a remarkable retrospective of the paintings, sculptures and photographs (and guitars!) of the Pontypridd artist Ron Lawrence. Ron has lived in the town all his life and this year celebrates 60 years of continuous work. The paintings vary enormously in style, from 1950s landscapes and portraits not far in […]