Cathy's Art Diary

Grand exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at the music, design and career of Pink Floyd. I kept veering between finding this exhibition visually stunning and clever to finding it annoying. It was sometimes hard to tell which way round you were supposed to go and sections seemed to go against the natural flow of the crowd. Also a lot of the displays were quite low and you looked down into them a bit like a shop display.This meant that unless you were at the front it was hard to see the objects and even harder to read the commentaries. However it was wonderful to enter the show through a mock-up of an early tour bus and I loved the room with some of the inflatables from late 1970s. It took me a while to realise the telephone boxes represented what was going on at the time, once I did I thought they were a clever idea. I liked the sections on how they thought about how to play a stadium concert and fill the space in a more imaginative way than a band on a far...

Beautiful new extension to the Victoria and Albert Museum providing a new entrance and using the colonnade that runs along Exhibition Road. The outside space here is stunning with beautiful ceramic tiles on the floor and interesting angles and shapes within the Victorian courtyard which has been opened up. Inside it was good to go down and see the new exhibition space before it is used but it seemed a bit odd not to be utilising it as part of the launch. However I founded inside space a bit confusing. I’d assumed you could get to the new café from inside it turns out the entrance is only from the courtyard. Also it needs slightly better signposting as signs each side point to the ‘The Galleries’, it might help to know which ones are which way. The signage gap seemed to have been filled with nice volunteers but I had to ask five different people before anyone could tell me that the members’ room isn’t ready yet.   The new shop is quite small but there is a cloak ro...

Strange exhibition at the Streetlife Museum of Transport in Hull looking at the evolution of the Hull City football team’s kit. Maybe this just proved I’ll go and see anything but actually once you started to look properly and read the commentary it was quite interesting. I missed the bit which said why the team plays in black and orange however it has given rise to their nickname of the Tigers. I loved the slightly dodgy period when the kit imitated tiger stripes, a very 70s image. I liked the story that the team played in purple for a while but lost twice so never wore the shirts again. I was also interesting to see the strange sponsors they’d had over the years including Cash Converters and Flamingo Park. Closes on 2 October 2017  

Fun exhibition at the Humber Street Gallery in Hull looking at how play shapes our lives and the role of play in adult lives as part of Hull City of Culture. This was a fun interactive exhibition with lots to see, do and make you think. It explored the role of experimental play as part of creative thinking and making things. Fun objects included a take on the old penny drop arcade machine but using tokens based on those used by Hull merchants. I liked Richard Slee’s sculptures of the trajectory of ping pong balls as they bounce. There was a display of software which downloads model designs from a website and combines them to randomly build new works and installation of chairs with the bottom on one leg cut at an angel to enable you to balance them on one leg. I liked a slightly creepy robot which seemed to be able to see you and comment on what you were doing. The picture is of a knitted lamp which took energy from people coming near it and lit up and knitted a bit mo...

Small exhibition at the Kingston Art Group Gallery in Hull of sculptures by Simon Drury and Andi Dakin. The works were found objects reworked into new pieces. I liked the golf tees set into rolling pins and the sieves with plaster poured into them. Some were shown with the wire side facing out to show the pattern made by the plaster and it seeped though and other had other objects set into the plaster inside. Closed on 30 July 2017  

Innovative art trail around the Fruit Market in Hull of installations using paper from the Colorplan range of Hull paper merchant G.F. Smith. There were some delightful works in this trail but it was also a chance to visit unusual buildings such as smoke house. Some installations such as that by Adam Holloway which used the structural qualities of the strength of the paper to build a large spiral work in white and coloured paper. Others used the colour such as “The Fabric of Hull” which was hanging using the different coloured papers woven together and made by the employees of G.F. Smith. My favourite piece was Jacqueline Poncelet’s “Island Life” which placed folder shapes in different colours on the floor of a closed space. As you walked through it you could see the colours change as you saw them in different combinations. There was also a pop up shop featuring items in the World’s favourite colour, as researched through an online project. The colour was a called Mar...

Delightful exhibition at Ferens Art Gallery in Hull looking at the different ways artists have looked at how the sea has shaped our culture and imagination. I loved the mix of older, modern and contemporary work in this show and the fact it included ten new commissions developed with leading marine scientists. It looked at how we have viewed the sea and the environmental impact of our relationship with it. It was nice to see some Martin Parr photographs of the sea side included. His work seems to be appearing everywhere at the moment. Also to see some 19th century scrimshaw, carving on whale teeth. Tactica Dean’s “Roaring Forties” was there which I last saw hung alongside Turners at the Tate. Sadly we didn’t get to see the second half of the show over the road at the Hull Maritime Museum as we ran out of time. The picture I am using was a beautiful new work by Alexander Duncan which looked like a pile of rocks but was discarded polyurethane and polystyrene moulded by ...

Fascinating exhibition at the Ferens Art Gallery exploring modern and contemporary artists responses to the naked human figure. It looked at the greater honesty modern artists bring to the subject as they abandon the traditional ideas of the idealisation of the body and life drawing. It focused on three artists, Lucian Freud, Ron Mueck and Spencer Tunick, although it also used other works from their own collections and good loans to put these artists in context. It was a nice touch to include a preparatory study of Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe by Manet as this work caused such a scandal when it was first shown, depicting a nude woman with clothed men. It was also nice to see a Stanley Spencer of Patricia Preece. The first room was devoted to Ron Mueck strangely realistic sculptures despite being unrealistic in scale. I find them quite hard to look at as they seem to creep into your space and challenge your perceptions but I do find then beautiful and it was nice to see a collec...

Interesting exhibition at Ferens Art Gallery in Hull to examine the themes in a picture on loan from the Royal Collection, Rembrandt’s “The Shipbuilder and his Wife”. It’s a picture I know well from various exhibitions at the Queen’s Gallery but it was nice to see it stand alone and to see it’s various themes explored in more detail. What a lovely picture to lend to a sea faring town. It was a lovely chance to look in more detail at the picture rather than thinking of it in the context of other works. I’d not realised before that he is in the process of drawing the designs for a ship and I love the paraphernalia of his work on his desk. I also love the sense of his wife rushing into the room to give him a letter and of course the beautifully painted faces. It gave the gallery a chance to explore the theory that Rembrandt spent several months in Hull in 1661, an idea promoted by the antiquarian George Vertue. It was lovely to see Virtue’s original notebook there lent by...

Nice refurbishment of the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull. I have always been fond of this gallery and its gem of a collection and it was nice to see it looking spruced up. I was pleased that the space hadn’t been altered that radically. A new café and bookshop had been added but it was nice to read that most of the money had been spent on improving the lighting, air conditioning etc to protect the pictures and enable them to attract prestigious loans. The gallery shows the collection off well and I like the way the room designs reflect the art shown in them. I liked the room upstairs which looked at the history of the gallery and it’s collection, highlighting some of the main donors. It was nice to see some old friends such as the large Richard Carline of his family and friends including Stanley Spencer and his wife, Richard’s sister, Hilda and there is a nice collection of sea pictures reflecting the city it sits in. Review Times

Disappointing workshop at the National Gallery talking about how to look at a picture. I’d hoped the talk would focus particularly on the brush work of Rubens and Van Dyck as they were in the title and the description had talked about brushwork however this was just part of the afternoon. We did talk a bit about their style and had interesting photos of details to compare and then spot the works by these artists. However the bulk of the talk was about how to look at pictures and the elements to look at and think about when looking however the examples veered away from the named artists to compare different eras and styles. This looked at composition, subjects, clothes and much more than brush work. I’d looked forward to a more detailed session. It would have been a good introduction to looking at art but I was hoping for something a bit more advanced. We then finished with a fun session in the Italian 17th century gallery comparing photos of details of other works by ...

Interesting exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of self-portraits by Cameroon born photographer Samuel Fosso. The first gallery showed his more recent work where he has taken 666 large format polaroid pictures of himself on an hourly basis. They did all look quite similar and it was a relief when one looked to one side. I’d have liked to see times on the pictures to think about whether he looked slightly different at different times of day. The second room was his earlier work from the 1970s when he has set up a studio aged 13. He dressed up and posed in the evenings to use up spare film. He looks at post-colonial African identity. There are some great 1970s trousers and I like the fact you can see the mechanics of the studio. Closes on 24 September 2017  

Excellent exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery to mark this year’s BP Portrait Award. If you read me regularly you’ll know I love this annual show and I think this years’ was particularly good. A lot of the pictures had a more realistic feel than some years and there were less abstract works. As in previous years there seemed to be quite a lot of egg tempura pictures including a lovely one of a young girl by Madeline Fenton and the third prize winner Anthony Williams’s lovely picture made up of tiny brush strokes making up the skin tone and hair of a nude figure. I loved Silvestre Goikoetxa’s wonderful treatment of spectacles and how they change the light around the eyes. Also Claire Eastgate’s picture of Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke, two poets, sitting on a sofa with the words of their poems on the wall behind. Alan Coulson’s “Honest Thomas” had a lovely blend of the detailed pattern of the tattoos on this arm with the pattern on his t-shirt. My favourit...

Delightful exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of work by Chrystel Lebas in conjunction with the Natural History Museum. The works were created in response to a collection of glass plate photographs and field notes by botanists and ecologist Sir Edward James Salisbury. 100 years on Lebas revisited the work and sites. In one case the exhibition showed Salisbury’s original shot of Arrochar and the new version, a large panoramic photo of an inlet with houses in one side. There were also some beautiful close detailed views of plants. Closes on 5 August 2017

Engaging exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of recent work by the photographer Gregory Crewdson. Shot around Crewdson’s rural hometown, Becket, Massachusetts, these images show people either overwhelmed by vast sublime landscapes or trapped in interior scenes. I particularly liked the interior pictures which had a feel of both Hopper and Vermeer in their intensity. I also liked the way you could spot the same furniture and objects in different pictures. I found myself making up narratives around the images so they felt like a book of shorty stories. Closes on 10 October 2017. Review Times

Intriguing exhibition at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham of late work by the Australian artists Sidney Nolan to mark 100 years since his birth. I only know Nolan though his iconic Ned Kelly pictures but these later works were large portraits done in spray paint when he was living for the last 14 years of his life on the Welsh-Midlands border. The earlier series were of people Nolan had known such as Francis Bacon and Benjamin Britten while the later ones feature Aboriginal subjects and in particular the those who were the subject of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. The Aboriginal work had an echo not only of modern street art but also Aboriginal cave paintings. They were in bright colours. I did find the images played with your eyes a bit as they had an out of focus feel which you eye tried to correct. Closes on 3 September 2017  

Strange exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham showing two installations by Indian artist, Sheela Gowda. I am afraid this show was what I’d describe as mess as art! The first room had scaffolding in with red material hung in a rather random fashion on it and a few stones. I’ve no idea what it was about. I liked the second room better which had sheets of flattened metal drums some of which had been mad into bowls. I like the fact you could see all stages of a work and I guess it was about making something out of nothing but again it seemed a bit messy! Closes on 3 September 2017  

Colourful exhibition at the Library of Birmingham of work by Czech artist, Paval Brazda. These were large digital prints on canvas taking a wry look at life and people. The images are in bright colours with bold outlines round the images. Some of the work had a pointillist feel as they were pixilated. Brazda invented his own art movement in the 1940s called Hominism, art for and about people. And the images did make you smile. My favourite was a large striking purple rhinoceros on a yellow background. Closed on 1 July 2017  

Thought provoking exhibition looking at how contemporary artists have been influenced by the rapid development of technology. The show featured work both using technology and influenced by it. There was a rather disturbing video installation by Rachel Maclean on the sexualisation of childhood using a Disney/pop video style which drew you in to difficult issues which engaging imagery. I liked Brian Griffith’s antiquated super computer made of card board boxes and Ryan Gander’s installation including a recording of his Great Aunt talking about Radio 4! It was lovely to see Marcus Coate’s “Dawn Chorus” again. It is an installation of screens showing people in their morning routines to a sound track of them singing the dawn chorus. It’s hard to explain but is very beautiful. He recorded the dawn chorus, slowed it down to human pitch, got people to sing at that pitch then speeded it back up to represent he bird sound.   I saw it before at Fabrica in Brighton and find it ver...

Fun sculpture trail around Birmingham featuring bears decorated by different artists. The trail was called the Big Sleuth as it turns out a sleuth is the collective noun for bears. Who knew! I was there soon after the trail launched so only saw the bears based in the main art gallery which mainly seem to be have been designed by local schools. There must have been about 20 colourful bears lurking around the museum. I wish I’d been there a bit later when more of the bears had been unveiled around town. I do like a good trail and this one comes with an app to help you get around. Of the ones I saw the one in the picture I’ve used was my favourite partly because he is called Hairy Potter!

Interesting exhibition at the Barber Institute of Fine Art in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery looking at how Victorian photographers exploited the new medium. It looked at how Victorian and Albert pioneered the use of the new technique popularising it amongst the masses and at how studio were set up to meet this demand. It looked at pictures which had tinting added or details painted in. It had an examples of a day book from Camile Silvys studio and also of family albums. It also showed how images could be manipulated with an example of the original studio picture of Edward VII and Alexandra and the version which was marketed which was coloured and put them in a garden. It talked about how men were shown in active roles but women in passive ones even Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman doctor, who is shown reading with eyes downcast not looking at the camera. I loved the small studio they had set up with changeable backgrounds and dressing ...

Charming exhibition at the Barber Institute of Fine Art of work by the University of Birmingham’s artist in-residence Matthew Pagett. Inspired by calendars and year book entries he was used three fictional characters, a student, a lecturer and a gardener, he presents university life in a calendar with one picture for each month. Each month has a picture of student activity, mainly sporting and lovely quotes from the fictional characters such as “Year in, year out, they’re all the same, thinking they are different, desperate to grow.” They are a lovely insight into university life. Closes on 17 September 2017  

Nice little exhibition at the Barber Institute of Fine Art looking at the history of Byzantium through its coins and seals. There was a good timeline of the empire in coins with the real coins and enlarged pictures of them so you could see the detail. It showed how depictions of the emperors moved from being in military dress to civilian. It also showed how sometimes emperors were shown with their successors   or empress regents with their sons. The show looked at the iconography on the coins showing how Christianity started to be seen in the images however pagan imagery carried on alongside it for a long time. It also looked at how the coins were made moving from dies in the early years to casting later on and the show included some glass weights used to check the metal content of the coinage. The show included seals made of lead rather than wax which were used to authentic official documents. Closes on 18 March 2018  

Interesting exhibition at the Barber Institute of   Fine Arts Spanish of prints from their collection. Prints by Goya were the centre of the show but there were also works by Ribera, Picasso and Miro as well a Goya prints after works by Velazquez. The commentaries were excellent and in just 11 pictures they gave a good overview of Spanish art and its themes. The Goya prints were strange and surreal such as one called “There is Something Beneath the Sock Cloth” of a line of men in sacks. I always forget that Goya was working at the time of the French Revolution and showing the fear that this spread through Europe. The Picasso print was a nice one of his last wife turned to the right with good use made of dark patches as well as highlights. The Miro print was fascinating as it was the design for a stamp to be sold in aid of the Republican Government in the Civil War, an interesting contrast with Goya’s dissatisfaction with society. Closes on 22 October 2017

Eclectic exhibition at the Royal Academy of their annual open show of works. I thought the show was a good one this year, intelligently hung and with a good variety of work. It was nice to recognise some artists I’d seen around contemporary shows this year and from previous Summer Exhibitions and always love the smaller pictures which this year   seemed to have escaped from their usual rooms. However having said I thought it was a good show as I flick thought he book now I’m surprised at how few works I remember. My highlights this year included Mick Moons pictures using the grain of wood to represent the sea and with exquisitely painted tiny boats on them, Cornelia Parker’s sculpture of two suspended silver post, one of which was squashed and Liane Lang “Blow Out” a picture of church interior with exploding stained glass. I made lots of other notes but so cryptic I can’t remember the work! Closes on 20 August 2017 Review Guardian Telegraph Evening S...

Interesting exhibition at Bernard Jacobson Gallery of works by Matisse. The show focused on a picture of Matisse in his studio from 1921 in which he shows himself in a rare self-portrait painting a model. It is shown with various studies of models and other pictures of people in interiors. I loved a picture of a woman in a green dress at a shuttered window with a Bloomsbury style painted wall under the window. There were also two delightful head studies of a girl with a hat and plaits. I was interested in an unfinished picture as I have been to some seminars at the National Gallery so it made me think about his technique and why various sections had been left. The pictures were shown with two bronze sculptures by Matisse, a lovely head study of his daughter and a crouching nude figure, as well as with a   copy of “Jazz” the colourful book of prints made using his cut out technique.   Closes on 16 September 2017  

Colourful exhibition at White Cube, Mason’s Yard of work by Wayne Thiebaud. Upstairs were delightful still lives of modern subjects in soft pastel colours in a pop art style. I loved the way he sometimes uses the paint to mirror the texture of the object such a round swirls of paint in a picture of doughnuts. I loved “Bakery Case” which showed the cake display in a bakery. Downstairs were more still lives plus some wonderful large landscapes in bright colours. ”Towards 280” was wonderful American cityscape which reminded me of Hopper in its focus on the ordinary. I loved “Y River”   which close up became more abstract with the river creating windows into scenes. I loved the texture of the trees. There were also some striking portraits such as “Green Dress” which pulled you across the room to look at it and “Robed Woman with Letter” where her skin was made up of the same colours as her robe. Closed on 2 July 2017. Reviews Guardian Telegraph Eveni...

Delightful exhibition at King’s College in Somerset House looking at the history and future of diaries. The show was based on the Great Diary Project started in 2007 which seeks to create an archive of diaries. It began by looking at the history including why dairies look the way they do and plotted famous diaries and technological changes on a timeline. The first use of the work diary in English was in 1581. This section also discussed modern diaries such as Facebook and apps.   The show then looked at the various reasons people keep diaries and how the reasons haven’t changed even if the methods have. One section looked at diaries as a way to log our lives. I loved a quote here that “users of fitness apps are the moral descendants of those Puritans who turned to diaries to review their faults and aspire to virtues”. Guilty as charged! There was an interesting video about online health diaries made even more interesting as it was set where I live. Another room lo...

Confusing exhibition at Somerset House looking at ten perfumes and what makes them unique. Once I understood the pattern for the show I quite enjoyed it but I was so confused at the beginning I found myself getting angry at the vapidness of it. If the guide in the first room had explained a bit more about what was going to happen rather than just thrusting a chart at me saying “It’s for social media. It starts here in room 1” I might have stood a better chance. It turned out it wasn’t room one it was a introductory room and the sheet was to get you thinking about your first impressions of each scent and whether that changed when you knew more about it. OK so once I’d worked it out this show was quite clever. There were five rooms each with a visual representation of a specific scent and small bags or balls to sniff the scent from. This was followed by a room told you want the five scents were, how they had been developed and what they were made up of.   This then repea...

Excellent one day course organised by the London Art History Society and held at the Conway Halls looking at the history of the Italian courts and focusing on the Malatesta family. The course was led by Geoffrey and Paula Nuttall who were clear and fascinating however a list of slides would have been useful follow up to check spellings etc. This course was the start of a series looking at the Italian courts so we started in the morning my looking at the history of Italy at this time and how the courts became so powerful in the late 14th and early 15th centuries.   I have always found this a confusing bit of history and for a brief moment I felt I understood the political machinations of the time but I’m not sure I could tell you now. The second half of the morning outlined the culture of magnificence looking at how the courts used the arts to maintain and promote their image. Paula used a lot of images from Frederico de Montelfelcro to show how he wanted to be seen as ...