Cathy's Art Diary

Colourful and jubilant exhibition at Tate Britain of paintings by Hurvin Anderson. Anderson was the first child in his family to be born in the UK after his family arrived from Jamaica and his work reflects his experience here and travels back to the Caribbean.   The paintings were large and full of colour starting with images drawing on his childhood in Birmingham. I loved one of a municipal swimming pool. There were some striking images of trees. He caught the heat and atmosphere of the Caribbean and I loved an abstract looking piece which you realise is a room viewed via the iron grid which is often used in windows instead of glass to let in the air and a similar idea of a tennis court seen through chicken wire. The final room had new work made for the show including a black and white image of Haile Selassie's arrival in Jamaica in 1966 and two based on a found image of a courting couple on a raft surrounded by a luscious landscape. Closes 23 August 2026 Reviews Ti...

Muddled installation at Tate Britain in the large Duveen galleries by Zineb Sedira. I say muddled as there are a lot of large installations but I didn't feel they hung together. The theme was African cinema using it to explore memory, migration and trauma. Not knowing anything about the subject I would have appreciated a bit more explanation of each section of the work. I liked each piece and they worked well in the space including a recreated cinema and café, large cinema style sign boards and a camper van. I must go back again and give the piece a bit more time and concentration. Closes 17 January 2026 Reviews Guardian Telegraph

Interesting installation at Tate Britain by Mohammed Z Rahman. It marks the Tate owning two works by Rahman and it showcased them in a structure resembling Bengali timber wedding canopies grouping them with other works by the artist. He has envisaged the display as a theatrical production in two acts with the first being about the home and the second act which looks at love in all its forms. In each case the Tate painting introduces the space and leads you in. Closes 6 November 2026

Wonderful exhibition at Tate Britain on the life and work of James McNeill Whistler. The show was beautifully designed starting from the first room which was an invocation of his studio with pieces of furniture and ceramics he had owned alongside his drawing board and brushes. After that it ran chronologically from his talented early work though to his later experiments in painting in black. There were lots of old friends alongside work I'd never seen before and a good mix of painting and prints. As I'd travelled to the galley via Thames Clippers, I was of course drawn to the paintings and prints of the Thames which ranged from the wonderful "Wapping" painting of people in a   pub with the river behind, through the calming Nocturns and various print series. Closes 27 September 2026 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph

Innovative exhibition at Charleston Farmhouse looking at hidden histories of madness through 12 people connected to Charleston. Developed by the Mad Heritage Collective it consisted of a round table to resemble the one in the dining room of the house, with shards of plates which you place on four place settings to make whole dishes, and that activates sound sculptures and readings via headphones. Each shard has an image of one of the 12 people associated with the house and their design mirrors the Famous Women Dinner Service on show in the next room. Around the walls are poems made up of text from cut up books responding to the stories. I later found a booklet in the café giving more information on each of the people. I'm not sure if I missed that in the space or if it had been closed down for the night as I was there for an event after hours and I’d snuck onto the welcome space before you go into the house to see this installation. I'll need to go again. Closes 6 Septem...

Disappointing exhibition at Charleston in Lewes focusing on the 20th century artist Gladys Hynes. I was looking forward to this as Hynes had come up recently in a lecture and I was interested to see her work and learn more about her. The disappointment came because there was more work by other people in the show than by her. This did set her well within her circle and the art of the time, but it took the focus off her. I suspect part of the problem was that she was so of her time that some elements were problematic now such as her friendship with known Fascists in the 1930s and in some cases I felt art by others was used to put forward alternate views. Obviously, it was right to acknowledge these issues but it made the show a bit heavy handed in places. I loved her pale colours and elongated figures and the inclusion of a beautiful portrait sculpture by her and well as designs for book covers. Closes 11 October 2026

Enlightening exhibition at Charleston in Lewes looking at the life and work of Walter Sickert with an emphasis on his works on paper. The show followed his work chronologically looking at the role of drawings and print making at the various stages of his career. It also looked at how he repeated images and examined the everyday. There were some paintings, many from Charleston's own collection, but most interesting were the drawings and prints particularly a couple of examples where they were shown together to give an idea of how an image developed between forms. Closes 11 October 2026

Interesting online lecture from the Wallace Collection looking at the artist William Nicholson and his influence on the art of Winston Churchill. Simon Martin,   director of Pallant House Gallery, which recently had an exhibition on Nicholson, led us through his life and art. I had seen the show and loved I so it was interesting to be reminded of it. Talked us through his early print work, his portraits and landscapes and his wonderful still-lives. Given the lecture was put on to mark the Wallace Collection’s Churchill show I would have liked to know a bit more about the connection. They met in 1933 when Nicholson was commissioned to paint a portrait of Churchill and his wife and in subsequent years Nicholson is known to have visited Chartwell, Churchill’s home on at least 10 occasions and they were known to paint side by side. Churchill referred to Nicholson as his Cher Maître or Dear Master.

Fascinating online discussion from the Monumental Welsh Women Committee live streamed from the National Library of Wales examining the committee’s project to commission five statues of real Welsh women over five years. I have been interested in this project since a friend Eve Shepherd unveiled the first of these works of Betty Campbell in Cardiff. This talk brought together the five artists chaired by Felicity Evans, BBC Wales Political Editor and a member of the committee, to discuss their work. It was the first time the five artists had been together. The five works are :      * Betty Campbell by Eve Shepherd      * Elaine Morgan by Emma Rodgers      * Cranogwen by Sebastian Boyesen      * Lady Rhondda by Jane Robbins      * Billie Bond by Elizabeth Andrews   Each artist introduced their subject and statue then they discussed themes which had emerged from the projects including the role of...

Another excellent study morning from Paula Nuttall looking at drawings from the Netherlands in the 15th and 16th centuries to compliment the exhibition at the British Museum. Nuttall talked us thought the reasons why drawings were made and the techniques and materials used. She spent a lot of time talking about how drawings were used in artists’ workshops and looked in particular at the nine works by or from the workshop of Roger Van de Weyden. In each case she talked about the function of the drawing and highlighted any paintings which derived from them. We then looked at how drawings were used for work on different media as a design tool covering tapestry, prints, stained glass, sculpture and manuscripts. This was also a useful way of introducing these different media in the period. Finally she looked at the later years when ideas from Italy started to creep into the work from classical ideas to Italian landscapes done by artists on their travels. I had seen the show shortl...

Interesting online course from the London Art History Society looking at how the artists of Naples developed a Baroque style in the 17th century. Giulia Martina Weston, an associate lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, led us through the topic with six well planned lectures. Day one focused on the effect of Caravaggio having worked in the city and how artists either adopted or rejected this style. We then looked at Luca Giordano and his work in the city as well as in Florence, Rome and Venice. Day two concentrated on architecture in particular the work on Cosimo Fanzago. The first lecture focused on the Certosa de San Martino talking us through its design and decoration in detail. The second lecture then broadened out to look at his work for the religious orders and his secular commissions. The final day looked at Mattia Preti and Salvator Rosa, artists from Naples who worked further afield. We ended by looking at the art market examining how much different artists were p...

Fun exhibition in the Archive Gallery at Glyndebourne Opera House looking at how the costume department made Louise Alder's impressive dress for the Last Night of the Proms in 2025. The room was dominated by the dress itself. I remembered it from the concert and it was very impressive. I hadn't realised the back was red with a red and blue bow. I remember at the time hearing that the costume department had made it for her as she had been starring in one of their productions that year. It was shown with pictures of other dresses made in response to the Union Jack and photographs explaining the process of designing and making it. There was also bunting made from odd cuts decorated by members of the team who had made it. Closes 30 August 2026

Interesting exhibition at Glyndebourne Opera House of work by contemporary artist Sara Berman responding to their new production of "Billy Budd". Berman is a former fashion designer, now painter, who was given access to the costume department over the past year, and it draws from the costumes and elements of the set. The show consists of large-scale paintings and smaller drawings both of her in some of the costumes and others of tangled rope. Evidently the latter explore themes of vulnerability in the opera. The work also included some text based pieces Berman made when she was housebound   following major surgery in the Autumn where she used a child’s printing set to stamp build abstract works made up of words from the libretto. I loved the images which looked good in the space. I have yet to see the opera so may reassess the work after I've seen it but for now it served as a good trailer for it and I am looking forward to seeing it in a few weeks. Closes 30 Aug...

Touching exhibition in the Organ Room at Glyndebourne Opera House of a selection of costumes worn by Dame Felicity Lott. I say touching as since the display was planned Dame Felicity Lott has died. The display was organised with her to mark the auction of a number of her outfits in aid of   Friends of Sussex Hospices in October. As she was involved in the show the descriptions of the outfits had been written by her. There were five outfits displayed in the fireplace including a kaftan made by Glyndebourne’s costume department, worn at the BBC Proms, and a military jacket designed by Laurent Pelly, director of this season’s Ariadne auf Naxos. This was a lovely unintentional homage to the singer who had often sung at the opera house and who lived nearby. Closes 30 August 2026

Interesting online lecture from the National Gallery looking at their Stubbs exhibition as it came to an end. Aliki Braine discussed the place of Stubbs in the National Gallery with the iconic “Whistlejacket” bookending one end of the longest vista in the gallery. She described him as “A place finder for visitors”. I hadn’t realised that he’d only been acquired by them in 1997. She discussed whether we can consider “Scrub”, the focus of the show, can be considered to be a portrait of a horse, looking at what she felt constitutes a portrait and concluding that it can be. She also looked at the two other projects represented in the show, Stubbs book on the anatomy of the horse and a series of portraits of all the thoroughbred horses over 50 years, a project which failed. This was an interesting lecture but very similar to others I had done on the show. I’d like to see these talks at the end of shows having more of a sense of reflecting on what had been learnt from seeing the wor...

Exquisite exhibition at the British Museum of Netherlandish drawings from 1400 to 1600. I love this period in Northern Renaissance art and this show didn't disappoint. Starting with the early works done as preparatory studies for workshops through to drawings made as works of art in their own right, they were shown with excellent explanations. This initial trip was a fairly quick one but I still managed to photograph most of the works! I'll definitely be going back particularly as I'll doing a course on it in a couple of weeks. The works were beautifully shown in the Print Room Gallery which gives you a shelf to lean on to study the detail, and what a lot of detail there was! I think my favourite was a procession by the workshop of Roger Van de Weyden with stunningly real faces. I also liked two kneeling ladies from the workshop of Hugo van der Goes. From the later period I loved a portrait of a older lady by Frans Pourbus and a print design by Pieter Bruegel the Eld...

Fascinating exhibition at the British Museum introducing the planned memorial gardens for the late Queen in St James's Park. The display had good illustrations and explanations which were shown with maquettes of the planned statues and sculptures as well as one of the park itself. I loved the one of the Queen and Yinka Shonibare's Commonwealth Wind Sculpture. My one complaint is that it was shown in the historic Reading Room which was full of tourist groups being lectured to about the room who seemed unaware of the exhibition and swarmed around it. It would have been a better experience if it had been shown in a different space. Closed 21 June 2026

Wasted installation at the British Museum to anticipate the arrival of the Bayeux Tapestry in September. The work was outside the main entrance to the gallery and consisted of trees and plants typical of East Sussex where the Battle of Hastings happened. They sat on hessian-wrapped rootballs in the colours of the tapestry. The work was designed by Andy Sturgeon. I say wasted as the space was too busy for the work, so it was very hard to see it. It was swamped by tourists and I suspect most of them had no idea that it was a temporary art work. It was such a good idea but it might have been better to place some of the trees in a cordoned off area so you could actually see them. The best area was the flowers along the top of the steps. Closed 2 June 2026

Colourful exhibition at the Wallace Collection examining the paintings of Winston Churchill. The show was arranged chronologically starting with some crude early works done in the First World War. Throughout there was an emphasis on how he painted to help his mental health. I know his work fairly well from Chartwell but it was interesting to see the work up close and to realise how thick the paint was. Often the work felt a little basic up close but worked well from a distance. I was fascinated to see he’d given the works to and the show also became an insight into friendship and political ties. Closes 29 November 2026 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph

Interesting little exhibition at the Wallace Collection looking at how it operated during the Second World War. I had assumed it would be about how they moved the paintings and there was a small section on that but mainly it was about two exhibitions that took place in 1942 organised in support of the Soviet Union after it entered the conflict on the Allied side following the Nazi invasion of its territories in June 1941. The first featured work by British artists and this display included a number of works which were in the show as well as ephemeral. The second took the form of a Soviet-styled agitprop intervention, celebrating the achievements of the socialist state since 1917 and the display included photographs of the exhibition designed by Erno Goldfinger and a copy of the poster. Closes 25 October 2026

Moving exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery combining the photographs of Donna Gottschalk and the words of Helene Giannecchini. From the age of 17 Gottschalk has photographed her lesbian friends. Finding her work and becoming friends in 2023, Giannecchini was given access to her archive and worked it into a moving narrative framed as a walk around areas of New York where Gottschalk had lived. A deeply personal collection was transformed into the story of a community with words and images having equal weight. Closed 7 June 2026 Review Guardian

Quirky little exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery celebrating small online communities and   DIY and experimental publishing practices. I admit I’m not sure I understood it but at the heart was an interactive online quiz with questions about your online experience which then printed out a description of the type of online community you should join. Suitably for a blogger and former librarian it suggested I joined a wiki page. You were also invited on a second print out to write down your earliest online memory and pin it to a board. I’m not sure many went back to dial up modem which involved ramming a landline headset into two cups! Closed 7 June 2026

One of the better iterations of this annual exhibition at the Photographers’’ Gallery for the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize. I have learnt that this is not a straight photography award but also included contemporary art works which have included extensive use of photography. I found all the four shortlisted entries very engaging this year. On the top floor I began with Weronika    Gęsicka constructed images based on "mountweazels" , fictitious encyclopaedia entries inserted as copyright traps as well as fabricated Wikipedia pages. She asks us to question what is real and what is fictitious in these believable images.   Next was Amek   Mahmoodian   “One Hundred and Twenty Minutes” based on the fact that on average we dream for 120 minutes a night. An exile herself, she has asked fellow exiles to share their dreams and work with her to construct images of them in drawings, photographs and words. Down a floor found Rene Matić’s installation of diaristic...

Innovative exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall looking at 50 years of skate boarding in the undercroft there. The show was actually in the covered bit of the undercroft behind the skateboard area. It was slightly odd in that it was mainly videos shown on 5 or 6 screens with a timeline round the room however I found myself getting sucked in by the timeline with details of how it built up and how it’s been threatened over the years. I didn’t have very long to watch the videos, but they seemed to be the stories of users of the space over the years. The timeline had mentioned a lot of films which had been made there so boarding and film making seem to have gone hand in hand. I loved the fact you sat on benches like skateboard ramps to watch the films which were shown one by one across all the screens. Closed 21 June 2026 Review Evening Standard

Surprising fair at Glynde Place specialising in ceramics. I say surprising as it was huge! Having been to an event at the house before I expected a few stalls around the house but instead it was set in marquees in the extensive grounds. We had gone to see our friend Eve Shepherd’s sculptural work and were pleased to see she had won a prize. However, we also discovered lots of beautiful and enticing things. I was so tempted to buy but resisted as I already have more small bowls and mugs than a girl will ever need. The visit was enhanced by it being a gloriously sunny day. Closed 24 May 2026

Passionate interview at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival of the author and art historian, Katy Hessel. Interviewed by Jon King, Hessel, author of the now famous "The History of Art Without Men" was discussing her new book "How to Live an Artful Life" which brings together daily quotes from artists and writers on creativity to inspire. I was astonished at how well she remembered quotes. The discussion broadened out into the barriers people face going into art galleries and the role of art. I loved Hessel saying that art is the truest representation of a time. The event had been due to have another speaker, Kate Bryan, who has written "How to Art" who had to pull out at the last minute. Hessel ably filled the evening but a second voice might have broadened the discussion.

Charming interview at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival with the artist, Rose Wylie Wylie was amusingly interviewed by the actor James Norton who owns a painting by her. He was very good at giving her space to speak, reserving questions for when they were needed but not taking a dogged approach to ask them all. Wylie was open and witty. Jennifer Higgie, art critic and editor of Frieze, was also on the panel to add a commentary but I suspect also as backup in case Wylie, who is 92 had struggled, which she did not. Wylie was guided to talk about a selection of her work which was being shown on screens which led her to muse on the titles of her works such as one called "Jumbo Meat Cleaver" because it was in the shape of a meat cleaver, the role of text in her work and the role of fame in her work. There were some brilliant quotes from her, "The older you get the more memories you have. The more you have to work with", as we laughed at one o...

Moving discussion at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival examining a joint project between the Imperial War Museum and Liberty to look at creativity in war and imprisonment. The catalyst had been the experience of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was on the panel, of getting Liberty material she had collected over the years, sent to her when she was imprisoned in Iran and the benefits of being able to be creative during that time. She talked about how she had shared the material with fellow inmates and other creative endeavours they had shared. James Bulgin and Rebecca Newell from the museum brought an insight into how Zaghari-Ratcliffe's experiences had chimed with their collection and they shared other moving stories of creativity in confinement with illustrations form the collection. Ester Coen, an art historian who has been working with Liberty on their 150th anniversary celebrations talked about the idea of working with Zaghari-Ratcliffe to design thre...

Thin exhibition at Charleston Farmhouse on the campaigning Gorilla Girls. The show brought together a number of their groundbreaking posters displayed multiple times as if on a street or the external walls of a gallery. The room was dominated by their iconic "Do Women Have to Be Naked…" poster which looked amazing in the space. Other posters were shown in groups. I found reading them interesting as they weren't always as strident as I had assumed and many were making sensible suggestions to art galleries about how to address issues of inequality, many of which I have seen institutions responding to. I just say thin as it concentrated on the posters as art objects, but I would have liked to see more about other work the group has done and some analysis of its effects. Closes 6 September 2026

Dense exhibition at Charleston Farmhouse looking at the history of the Hogarth Press. The press was started by Virginia and her husband Leonard in 1917 with the aim of publishing authors with radial new voices who might otherwise not get into print. They also treated books as art objects, commissioning striking book covers. I say dense about this show as the displays were mainly of books and it was very text heavy in its explanations. I am a self-confessed Bloomsbury nerd so I loved it, but I imagine if you were new to the subject it might leave you a bit cold. I was at the house for the start of the Charleston Festival so followed up my visit to the exhibition with the first two talks of the event, both on the Hogarth Press. The first brought together two current publishers with a similar ethos, Margaret Busby and Sharmiane Lovergrove in conversation with Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize.   This was followed by a gala style performance with Anton Lesser readin...

Bold exhibition at the Guildhall Art Gallery of paintings of London by Jock McFadyen. The first room featured his paintings of the London Underground shown with a soundscape by Jem Finer, one of the founding members of The Pogues. They were very atmospheric and you could almost smell that dank smell of the stations. The soundscape really added to this. The next room showcased his large paintings of overground London. I loved this one of railways arches and one which made me smile as a homebase appeared over the horizon like a sunrise. The last room looked at his early paintings of people which I felt were less successful. I was interested to read that it was a year as Artist in Residence at the National Gallery in 1981 which changed his style and made him look to the world outside for inspiration. Closes 20 September 2026 Review Times