Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting online discussion from the National Gallery focusing on posing. Aliki Briane, artist and art historian, interviewed two contemporary artists who make work by posing for images. Peter Braithwaite, opera singer and artist, recreates historical portraits of black figures, and Dominic Blake, is a life model at the Royal Academy as well as being an art theorist and has taken the modelling out of the studio into other spaces. I enjoyed their insights but I would have been interested to hear them talk more widely about the work of models over the centuries and about what it is like to pose for long periods rather than just posing as an art form.

Fascinating online lecture from the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at Peter Brathwaite’s lockdown project recreating portraits of black figures. Brathwaite is an opera singer who in lockdown took up the Getty Challenge to recreate portraits using objects around the house. He decided to look at black figures and produced an image a day for 50 days which he has now published in a book “A Story in Three Acts”. I had seen some of their works in a street exhibition on King’s College so was intrigued to hear him talking about them and to see more. He was interviewed by Jenny Gaschke, the coordinator of a display at the museum at the moment called “Between Two Worlds” for which he has produced the image shown here. He explained how making the images led him to research not only the people shown but also his own family history.   He talked about the bias in archives, not only in their content but also in the racist language to search them because of when they were created and cata...