Tag: British painting
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Three faces of Gwen John
I’m looking forward to seeing the big Gwen John exhibition at National Museum Wales in Cardiff. Few people now ask ‘Who is Gwen John?’, though it’s taken more than half a century for the world to catch up with Augustus John’s reported assessment of her work after she died in 1939: ‘in fifty years’ time…
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Still life, still alive
‘Still life’ is a paradox. Can something that’s still or unmoving be alive, especially if it’s a dead creature or an inanimate object? The French equivalent, nature morte, is equally stark in its self-contradiction. But the term isn’t the only paradox. One of the reasons why the still life has had such a long history,…
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Late style and Glenys Cour
To mark Glenys Cour’s hundredth birthday the Mission Gallery is currently showing around thirty of her paintings, some oil on canvas, others oil on paper. Most were painted in the last five years, so it’s a very different exhibition from the big retrospective in the Glynn Vivian in 2017, which looked back at over sixty…
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Cornelius Varley in Wales
Among the many artists who came to draw and paint in Wales around the turn of the eighteenth century, Cornelius Varley is yet to receive just attention. The pictures he made in Wales are fresh, delicate and strong, the work of a young man with great visual intelligence who reacted with instinctive wonder and clarity…