Cathy's Art Diary

Touching small exhibition at the Fitzrovia Chapel of photographs of David Bowie by Kevin Davies. Davies rediscovered these photographs taken over one day in December 1992 for the album “Black Tie White Noise”. The original collection was over 400 images of which 20 are shown here. There were a mix of styled images for the album and a series shot late in the day when Davies asked to capture Bowie “just as you are.” All the images were beautiful but I think my favourites were the informal ones. The official ones didn’t make the final cut for the album which was photographed by Nick Knight but were used for publicity for it. I was also interested as last year I went to an exhibition on photos by Brian Duffy for the “Aladdin Sane” album 29 years before so this was an interesting comparison. The works looked great in the space and it’s always good to have an excuse to visit this beautiful venue. Closed 20 March 2024 Review Evening Standard  

Colourful exhibition at the Gillian Jason Gallery of new work by Lucienne O’Mara. These were large, freely painted geometric abstracts worked in a loose grid format. I loved the way the colours bounced off each other. I was interested to read that’s the artist suffered a brain injury in 2017 which severely damage her vision, leading her to having to learn how to 'see' again. You do get a sense of someone grasping at an image. Closed 20 April 2024    

Beautiful sales exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of work by Cuban photographer, Raul Canibano. I loved the slightly surreal quality of some of these images. I couldn’t tell if this caught a moment or was a collaged piece. I loved a picture of a man though the net over a window which abstracted his image except for a defined eye seen through a hole in the net. Closed 7 April 2024

Fascinating exhibition at the   Photographers’ Gallery on the life and work of the photojournalist Bert Hardy. I went into the show not thinking I knew any of his work but was immediately greeted by an image of two girls on the seafront at Blackpool which I remember from many book covers and friends rooms at college. I laughed out loud when I read his comment on it from 1985 “People who have hardly ever heard of me will suddenly remember that picture. That’s me” and it was me too! From that moment I was hooked. Hardy was a pioneering photojournalist working for Picture Post from two years after its foundation in 1958. The journal aimed to explore social issues and he worked for them in the UK and abroad. I loved his clear, well-constructed images particularly those framed in doorways. I was fascinated by his work in the Second World War working for the Army Film and Photographic Unit. He landed in Normandy three days after D-Day and went into Bergen-Belsen a few days after l...

Interesting small exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery highlighting the publisher Café Royal Books . Since 2012 this publisher has produced a weekly publication in a small format dedicated to post-war photography from the UK and Ireland with a focus on unseen or overlooked work. Each of the over 600 issues highlights a small body of work by a specific photographer such as Martin Mayer looking at London in the 1970s. The journals were beautifully produced with nicely reproduced images and minimal commentary. Closes 2 June 2024  

Eclectic exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of the shortlisted finalists of this prestigious photography award. The award goes to at outstanding body of work exhibited or published in Europe in the previous 12 months and the show highlights the work of the top four artists. This year featured two artists who had had retrospectives and one of these, VALUE EXPORT, for Austria was showcased with a selection of work by this feminist photographer and performance artist over 5 decades. I’m not sure the work translated very well as static images. Despite being shortlisted for a retrospective Hrair Sarkissian was represented by two works. One was an eerie soundscape recording of exhuming bodies from a Spanish Civil War mass grave but the photographic element was 50 photographs of the empty homes of people who had disappeared in conflict which were very moving. In the floor below I liked Gavin Gill and Rajesh Vangad’s book blending Gill’s photography of India with Vangad’s indige...

Fascinating online lecture form the London Art History Society discussing medieval wall mosaics. Liz James from the University of Sussex took us though the practicalities of producing wall mosaics in the Medieval period using the works in the apse of the Church of Panagia in Kiti in Cyprus as a starting point. She briefly took us though the image but the talk mainly asked questions about how they got there and tried to answer them with observation and logical thinking. How do you design a building which is going to take the weight of a mosaic? How do you get the tesserae to the building site? Do they arrived coloured or does the artist have to do that? She acknowledged she might not have the answers but presented a starting point for thinking about the topic. It was a refreshing and exciting approach to art history.

Topical online lecture from the National Gallery on flowers in art to mark Mother’s Day in the UK. Lydia Bauman led us through 10 pictures from the collection and one more contemporary piece explaining the symbolism of flowers in each of them and how that changed over time. We started with one of my favourites shown here by Gerard David from 1510 of the Virgin and Child with saints in an enclosed garden and ended with a Georgia O’Keefe of a single flower. On the way we touched on Bronzino, Claud, Van Gogh and, of course, some 17th century Dutch flower arrangements. I would have liked a bit more depth on some of the works rather than this whirl wind tour but it gave me a different view of some familiar works and a desire to know more.

Interesting online lecture from ARTscapades looking at the art of Monet and how it was influenced by the women he was with. Jackie Wullschlager, author of a book with the same title as the lecture, led us though Monet’s life and career focusing on how his art changed with his marriages. She discussed how his girlfriend and later wife, Camille Doncieux, represented his early, radical work full of figures and representations of modern everyday life. She then moved on to the effect of her death on his art when he moved onto foggy landscapes. As he met and again later married Alice Hoschede he turned to staying close to home and studying the light effects at different times of day and year in series of paintings such as haystacks. Finally after Alice died and he grew older and his eyesight started to fail, his step-daughter, Blanche Hoschede, moved to Giverny and stayed with him during the period when he concentrated on painting the garden and produced the large waterlily painting...

Useful online study morning from the Wallace Collection to compliment their exhibition of watercolours by Turner and Bonington. Taking the exhibition as a starting point the morning consisted of five talks beginning with a description of the show by its curator Lucy Davis who discussed the pictures and how they entered the collection. John Bonehill from the University of Glasgow then talked about Turner and landed estates and the concept of estate portraits which I hadn’t consciously come across before. He talked about how Turner started doing these as a money spinner but developed the style into a higher form. Next was Timothy Barringer from Yale University looking at how both artists reflected the modern world and how pictures which look romantic to us also critique the changing world in which they were painted. There was a useful talk by Joyce H Townsend from the Tate taking us thought the technique of watercolour and developments in the early 19th century including the inv...

Disappointing online lecture from the National Gallery looking at female artists in the gallery’s collection. I say disappointing as from the title, I had assumed the talk would focus on female studio practice and in particular, that of Eva Gonzales. However the talk became a mix of a standard talk on female artists in the collection and ones I had done a couple of year’s ago on the Eva Gonzales portrait in a studio by Manet when there was a focus exhibition on the painting at the gallery. Jacqui Ansell, from Christies Education, as ever delivered the talk well with good images and intelligent coverage of the subject, but I felt the talk’s title had promised more focus than this. It was a good International Women’s Day talk but, as a paid talk, was not novel enough. Maybe I have just done too many National Gallery talks now!