drawing
Sarah Kent
Rose Wylie’s paintings are a blast of fresh air. Direct, anarchic, exuberant and determinedly daft, they make a mockery of the self-importance that so often infects the art world.Now in her nineties, she had to wait a long time before being able to spend time in the studio. Having studied at Folkestone and Dover School of Art, she married the artist Roy Oxlade, had three children with him and stopped painting in order to bring them up. In those days, it was normal practice for the man to be the Artist and the woman the Housekeeper while often also being his model, muse an assistant. Then Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Some exhibitions make you feel inspired, others perplexed. Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting at the National Portrait Gallery left me feeling battered and bruised – as if I’d been hit by a wrecking ball.The show doesn’t start out that way. In the early 1940s, Freud spent several years perfecting his drawing technique. At first, he used a mapping pen, which produces clear, sharp lines perfect for detailed observation.In a luminous self-portrait from 1947 intended as a book illustration, he uses a variety of marks to create the impression of a three-dimensional head. A shock of wiry hair Read more ...
Sarah Kent
If you stand close to a picture by Georges Seurat, the experience is totally different from being a few feet away. To a certain extent this is true of any painting since, close to, any brush marks and fine details are more apparent; but with Seurat the discrepancy is not only more emphatic, it was factored into his way of working.He devised what came to be known as pointillism (he called it chromoluminarism). Instead of mixing colours on the palette, he applied each hue separately in tiny dots and dashes, thereby allowing them to mix optically between the canvas and your eye.The technique Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When he was a callow youth of 18, German artist Anselm Keifer got a travel grant to follow in the footsteps of his idol, Vincent van Gogh. Some sixty years later, work by the two artists has been brought together at the Royal Academy in a show that highlights Van Gogh’s influence on his acolyte and invites you to compare and contrast.In the intervening years, Keifer has gained a huge international reputation with gargantuan paintings, sculptures and installations. His obsession with Van Gogh led him, in 1992, to move to the south of France where he transformed a former silk factory and the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When in the 1990s, Jenny Saville’s peers shunned painting in favour of alternative media such as photography, video and installations, the artist stuck to her guns and, unapologetically, worked on canvases as large as seven feet tall. While still a student at Glasgow School of Art, she painted Propped, 1992, one of the most challenging and memorable female nudes in the history of art (pictured below right). This enormous painting confronts you on entry to her retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, and it is still a knock out. Perching awkwardly on a tiny pedestal is a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I first came across Rachel Jones in 2021 at the Hayward Gallery’s painting show Mixing it Up: Painting Today. I was blown away by the beauty of her huge oil pastels; rivulets of bright colour shimmied round one another in what seemed like a joyous celebration of pure abstraction.Yet hidden within this glorious maelstrom of marks were brick-like shapes representing teeth; Jones is fascinated by mouths and the dentures that, literally and metaphorically, guard these entry points to our interior being.The 34-year-old is the first living artist to show in the main exhibition space at the Dulwich Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A traditional Korean house has appeared at Tate Modern. And with its neat brickwork, beautifully carved roof beams and lattice work screens, this charming dwelling looks decidedly out of place, and somewhat ghostly. Go closer and you realise that, improbably, the full-sized building is made of paper. It’s the work of South Korean artist Do Ho Suh (main picture).In 2013, he covered his childhood home in mulberry paper and painstakingly made a rubbing of every single nook and cranny of the exterior. He left the paper in situ for nine months until the drawing had weathered to resemble an old Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The best way to experience Ed Atkins’ exhibition at Tate Britain is to start at the end by watching Nurses Come and Go, But None For Me, a film he has just completed. It lasts nearly two hours but is worth the investment since it reveals what the rest of the work tries hard to avoid openly confronting – grief.Actor Toby Jones reads from a diary kept by Atkins’ father, Philip during the months before his death from cancer in 2009. With mordant humour, he titled it Sick Notes and, by turns, the entries are sad, funny, banal or full of pain and fury. Jones’ audience is a group of young Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie. Having explored similar territory for 50 some years, you’d have thought the American artist would have run out of ideas. Not a bit of it. Dominating the central space was a huge screen showing Untitled (No Comment) (main picture) which explores the Orwellian soup of Read more ...
Jack Barron
Last year, Wendy Cope’s poem, "The Orange", went viral on TikTok. I’m not totally certain how a poem goes viral, but it did – and there’s nothing we can do about it.In fact, Faber & Faber actively did something about it and released a selection of Cope’s poems in a slim, transportable volume: perfect commuter fodder. It turns out that this was the beginning of a series, and we now have a similarly slim and comparably portable selection of Stevie Smith poems, gathered under the title of her most well-known work, Not Waving But Drowning.Of course, we only have two in the series so far, but Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Iconic is a word the meaning of which is moving from the religious world into popular culture – win a reality TV show dressed as a teapot, and you can be sure that your 15 minutes of fame will be labelled iconic across social media. Not quite what Andrei Rublev had in mind 600 years ago.That said, few would deny that descriptor to the London Underground Map, not just a highly effective tool to navigate an ever-more complicated city, but perhaps the symbol of the metropolis. For something so ubiquitous and so useful, it is a surprisingly abstract work, owing more to Mondrian than Mercator Read more ...
theartsdesk
From Kafka’s spry sketches to Derek Owusu’s novel-poem, and Jaan Kross’s Estonian Wolf Hall to Katherine Rundell’s spirited biography of John Donne, our reviewers take the time to share their favourite books of 2022. Before his death, Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all of his papers. This included his short stories, novels (both finished and fragmentary), diaries, and his little-known foray into the visual arts. But now, collected extensively for the first time, we can find The Drawings (Yale University Press, £50) staring defiantly back at us. The fact that, if Kafka’s Read more ...