Cathy's Art Diary

Delightful exhibition at Leighton House Museum looking at the life and work of Lawrence Alma-Tadema. It was lovely that these works were shown throughout this beautiful house so that some were seen in the sort of aesthetic setting for which they were painted. There was a useful booklet with all the labels in but it took me a while to realise there were also room guides giving more background on some of the main works. I’d thought they were just guides to the rooms themselves. I also missed out on the tape which might have filled in a bit more of the background information. I was fascinated to see Alma-Tadema’s early work which placed him in the Flemish tradition he had been born into and included a lovely early self-portrait. The second room looked at his honeymoon in Pompeii and the almost overnight effect this had on his work. I loved the imagined Roman scenes populated with Victorian faces. He moved to London in 1869 on the death of his first wife where he met Laur...

Delightful exhibition at the Garden Museum of new work by Eileen Hogan, who had been artists in residence at the museum or not in residence as the museum was being refurbished. Hogan had set herself the task of visually mapping urban gardens and green space in London. There were lovely sketch books with pictures and notes. Some of these sketches had been worked up into oil paintings some of which used wax which gave a lovely matt finish. I loved one of Arnold Circus with grasses, railings and the houses behind. There was a nice video on how she worked.   Closes on 20 September 2017  

Nice refurbishment of the Garden Museum. I went to this museum just before it closed for refurbishment and found it delightful. I was therefore interested to see what changes had been made. The museum section looked cleaner and had the objects had been rehung. There was a lovely mix of paintings and objects exploring the history of and various themes in gardening. There is a new small art gallery to one side overlooking the old chancel space. I forgot to say it’s a converted church. There was also a nice new space looking at the history of the site which originally had been the site of Tradescant’s Ark of unusual objects. The collection from which went on to form the basis of the Ashmolean Museum. If you’ve not heard about it before try Philippa Gregory’s two novels about Tradescant and his son, Earthly Joy and Virgin Earth. The biggest change was to cloister at the back which has been enclosed round the edge and a nice new café has been built to one side. The courtya...

Strange exhibition at the Newport Street Gallery of work by Ashley Bickerton. This work was a strange mix of colourful works. The first room was a series of wall mounted installations looking like medical machines and complete with carrying cases/covers. The commentary said they are investigating what an art object is. I’m not sure I understood. The next room had coloured sharks with a large sculpture in the middle with five snake head self-portraits. The blue shark looked like it was hanging from the ceiling but was in fact standing on the floor supported on bronze ropes. I liked the rafts in the next room used as frames for objects representing masculine stereotypes. Upstairs I loved a wall of orange port holes full of pigment or types of objects such as one full of mobile phones, another with stones and one with yellow plastic cutlery. I don’t know what it meant but I liked it. There were also large portraits in elaborate frames with a Renaissance feeling as t...

Delightful temporary museum for the London Fire Brigade in Lambeth. This pop-up museum is using the space under another temporary museum, the Migration Museum. I assumed it was a pop up for the summer but the friendly guides explained that it had been there for about 10 months. There was a display of engines and all the equipment which is needed for an incident. There was also a virtual reality experience of fighting a fire but I chickened out of that! There was good room telling the history of the fire brigade in London with a mix of well written commentary boards and a few choice items. It was a nice touch that the room was painted in fire brigade red. There were also good boards on the plans to build a new museum on the site of a fire in which a number of fireman died in the late 9th century and the site of the London brigades first HQ. The plan is to build on the river and use the museum to regenerate the area. It looks really excepting. When I was there there was...

Small exhibition at the Migration Museum looking at the objects people choose to keep hold of whatever happen to them. The display had good photographs of people with the objects they considered to be keepsakes many of which had been passed on to them and they in turn would hand them on to others. There were good commentaries with the pictures and display cases nearby with some of the objects in them. Some of the stories were very moving such as Norma Seale-McConnie who was given a penny by her mother as she got on a ship in Barbados to come to England in 1958. It also included the comedian Henning Wehn and his much thumbed and very dilapidated English dictionary. Closes on 20 August 2017

Interesting exhibition at the Migration Museum looking at the Calais Jungle and the issues which led to its creation. The first section looked at people’s journeys to the camp with excellent photographs by Daniel Castro Garcia and Christian Sinibaldi particularly one of broken boats as a metaphor for broken people. I loved a gauze sheet covered in paper boats by Bern O’Donoghue and called “Dead Reckoning”. The next section looked at identity and talked about how people in the camp saw themselves and what they chose to show or keep hidden. I liked a sculpture of lots of little figures in a wide procession called “Wanderers” by Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen. The last section looked at the camp itself and the community which grew up there. The commentary said it’s format was like any other town but the population was overwhelmingly young males. Again there were great photograph but again the commentary points out that camera were often viewed with suspicion. I loved a sect...