Cathy's Art Diary

Moving online talk from the British Academy looking at a project to study the experiences of war widows which resulted in the making of a quilt. This event took the form of a discussion between various people involved in the project chaired by Sue Pritchard from Royal Museums Greenwich who were the first to show the quilt at the Queen’s House. I live nearby and am so sorry I missed that back in 2019. Nadine Muller from Liverpool John Moores University had initiated the project via an exercise to record the experiences of war widows in oral history interviews as she had found when she came to research the subject that very little had been written about them. During her interviews she realised that some of the women found it difficult to talk and she wondered if some sort of workshop might help them. Lois Blackburn, an artist and co-founder of Arthur-Martha which had worked on similar projects, met Nadine in the village they both lived in and suggested workshops around handcraft a...

Interesting online lecture from the National Gallery looking at how artists have dealt with conflict within pictures. Caroline Dawson, Belle Smith and Kate Turbard each took a picture and discussed the conflicts within it from the obvious fight within Luca Giordiano’s “Perseus Turning Phineus and His Followers to Stone” from the early 1680s to the philosophical conflicts in Joseph Wright of Derby’s “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” form 1768. We also looked at the idea of personal conflicts using Pierre Mignard’s “The Marquesa de Seignelay and Two of her Sons” from 1691, shown here,  which the speaker described as an elaborate dating profile picture.