Cathy's Art Diary

Series of excellent videos from Visit Flanders guiding you through various exhibitions and displays of Flemish art all filmed post lockdown. Each presenter has a slightly different style and all the videos come with subtitles which is particularly helpful for the two which are not in English. I love they cover which a wide period from Van Eyck to Ensor in the late 19 th century and you do start to spot similar themes and styles thought Flemish art. You have to draw parallels between Ensor’s “Entry of Christ into Brussels” and scenes like Bruegel’s Nativity. I wonder if there will be more in the series. Episode1 : Van Eyck I have reviewed this already as it is a film of the Van Eyck exhibition in Ghent. Episode2 : Bruegel This is set in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels and focuses on their collection of works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Michel Draguet, the director fo the museum, takes us on a whistle stop tour of the pictures pausing to discuss...

Weird but fascinating exhibition at the Royal Academy of the work of the James Ensor curated by the contemporary artist Luc Tuymans. I liked the opening section which looked at his early life in Ostend and how this affected his later work. Some of his family ran a curio shop selling seaside souvenirs and carnival objects such as masks. He also witnessed the disinterment of mass graves from the Siege of Ostend in the early 17th century to make way for building work so he would have been used to the site of skeletons. All of this helped to explain his strange later art focusing on masks and skeletons which seemed to come from nowhere. Some of the early work reminded me of Sickert as it was a bit muddy brown in colour and atmosphere. I liked his visceral still lives such as “The Skate” from 1892. I also liked the mix of the ordinary and weird in his work. In one beautiful picture on an interior, possibly a studio, you suddenly reason the figure on the chair is a skeleton look...