Cathy's Art Diary

Excellent online three week course from the National Gallery on landscape painting and how artists worked out of doors and represent themselves in the work. Aliki Braine, artist an art historian, guided us chronologically through the topic starting with how landscape painting grew out of map making and then often forms a stage set for a biblical or mythical scene, moving on to how it represented leisure and wealth in the 17th century and onto the from accuracy to atmosphere in the 19th century. In taking this approach she also laid out clearly the various theories of landscape painting over the centuries with good quotes which she then used to discuss a series of images. She also looked at how artists represented themselves in the work from including draftsmen in the image to emphasis that they had been to the place and recorded it to later artists whose hand we see in their brushwork. I was impressed at the array of artists that we covered and I discovered a number of names who...

Excellent two-day online conference from the Wallace Collection to mark the reuniting of their “Rainbow Landscape” with “Het Steen” from the National Gallery in an exhibition for the first time since they were together in Rubens’s family. Day one looked at Rubens’s creative process and how detailed technical analysis of the work can illuminate this. There were talks on how Rubens had a habit of expanding works as he worked on them with each iteration of the work being a complete composition. We looked in particular at these two particular landscapes and how they seem to have grown in parallel with each other, each starting a small landscapes but then expanding with new panels in two more phases. Day two we looked at what inspired Rubens and I learned about the notion of otium, the art of active leisure including painting and contemplating landscapes. We also looked at Rubens use of mythological figures to show fecundity and fruitfulness in landscapes. Most fascinating was an analy...

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...

Interesting exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art of recent work by the painter Stephen Hannock. There were two types of work large scale landscapes and smaller studies of light. The large scale pictures were on the surface landscapes in the sublime tradition, but as you looked at the closely they were much more than that. You started to notice words in the fields and rocks describing what the site meant to the artist or its history. There were also small digital photographs which blended into the background which the commentary described beautifully as “trapped like insects in amber”. I particularly like the city scape of Newcastle called “Northern City Renaissance, Mauve dawn” which seemed to act as a personal history of the city.   The smaller works were luminous pictures of light effects such as dawn over water. The setting was secondary to the study of the light. These were domestic pictures and shone from the walls.    

Stunning exhibition of painting of the River Thames by Kurt Jackson at the Redfern Gallery. As someone who was born and brought up near the Thames in Oxfordshire and now lives overlooking it in Woolwich I found this exhibition really beautiful. The works covered both urban and rural aspects of the river with an impressionistic feel. Some pictures were more distinct than others but they were all lovely! Painting is so much about sight but I liked the way her also wrote on the work what his other senses were telling him as he worked for example naming birds he could hear singing or in one just putting “mouthful of damsons”. He also included some ceramics with stencils of river bank plants and I badly wanted the earrings in the shape of the river! I made do with a signed book!