Cathy's Art Diary

Charming exhibition at the Royal Academy of works by Dame Laura Knight from the Academy’s own collection. The works were given to the Royal Academy in the 1972 by Knight’s executors to mark that she was the first woman elected to membership in 1936. This show focused on nudes, the countryside and theatre and circus. I loved the simply draw pictures of dancers recording moments in their movement in a few lines. The show includes a sketchbook from 1919 from time she spent watching the Diaghilev company. The nudes section pointed out that she had not been allowed to paint from life as a woman during her training so she employed her own models. It was a nice touch to show this work with a portrait of Knight by her husband Harold Knight. Closes 2 February 2020

Stunning exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of work by Dame Laura Knight. The exhibition included some wonderful pictures but also gave a good overview of how she worked and her immersion approach of spending months with her sitters who often seemed to become good friends. It also showed the balance between her commissioned work and the work she did for herself and to peruse a subject. I liked the arrangement of the exhibition into sections of her immersion work such as ballet and theatre, gypsies, circus and the war years. The section on her time in America when she painted black patients from the segregated wards of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore was fascinating My favourite though had to be the pictures from World War II when she was a war artist. She developed a smooth style which could be reproduced well as she knew it was important for the images to be circulated. The exhibition also gave a good view of her as a person and was as much about her as ...

Small exhibition in the Sunley Room at the National Gallery which has already been on tour to Bristol's City Museum and Art Gallery and the Laing Art Gallery, in Newcastle upon Tyne. It takes the opportunity too look at a bit of social history, how work and leisure have changed over the last 4000 years, and show this through works of art from the National Gallery’s own collection and loans from other galleries. It was a good idea and done well but somehow left me wanting more! As it is such a small space it could almost have been worth doing two separate exhibitions to give more depth, however it was good to see the links between the themes. Works such as the acrylic sculpture “The Traveller” by Duane Hanson showed how leisure can actually be hard work. There was the inevitable Lowry given the theme was work and a Ford Maddox Brown picture “Work” showing the sentimental view of the working classes in Victorian England. The most extraordinary piece was a roll of material from 1992 ...