Cathy's Art Diary

Delightful and colourful exhibition at Charleston Farmhouse looking at the lives and art of Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. The show looks at Morris and Lett-Haines's time founding and running the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing and examines their radical approach to creating and teaching art. The first room sets the scene explaining how, once the school was established, Lett-Haines spent less time painting to run the school and teach. Morris continued to paint as well as being a leading horticulturalist. Comparisons are made with their contemporaries in the Bloomsbury group based at the venue. The second room looks at their time before Suffolk in Paris and traveling in Europe. I think these were my favourite works in the show particularly two landscapes. The next room concentrated on Lett-Haines work mainly surreal paintings and small sculpture made from found materials. The show ended by looking at their protest work from environmental to political is...

Lovely exhibition at the Philip Mould Gallery looking at landscape paintings by Cedric Morris. Morris is best known as a painter of flowers but this show focused on paintings he made on his travels and around the various houses he lived in as a sister show to that at the Garden Museum which looked at him as a plantsman.    The show had excellent labels on the pictures telling you a lot about where and when they were painted. A lot of the pictures had very little sky in them which I liked including a long portrait shaped Italian landscape which had no sky as it just looked down on the site of a mountain. It was lovely that the show included a sign for Morris’s East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing Temporary Office sign and a Frank Dobson bust of the artist. I loved two stunning pictures with birds in the foreground and a landscape behind. I also loved the fact that I was welcomed to the gallery by the gallery dog, also called Cedric.   Closes on...

Fascinating exhibition at the Garden Museum looking at Cedric Morris’s flower pictures and examining what they say about him as a gardener and plantsman.   The show was also partly the love story of Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines who he met at an Armistice Day party in 1918. The narrative of the show hung on the houses they lived in and the gardens they created there. I was particularly interested in the later section on their life in Suffolk where they founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing where Maggi Hamblin and Lucien Freud, amongst others, studied.   The paintings of flowers were bold and colourful and the commentaries described the plants shown in them. I was amused to see that Morris sold his work in Fortnum and Mason’s. I loved the paintings of the art school war time gardens. Morris was also a well-known plantsman and became known as a creator of Iris hybrids. He was commissioned to illustrate the covers of seed catalogues which were delig...