Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating small exhibition at the Old Royal Naval College Visitors’ Centre looking at black sailors who had passed through the Royal Hospital for Seamen and the effect they had had on the area. This show was mainly information boards with just a few artefacts from the family of John Simmons who served at Trafalgar and is shown in this picture with his Trafalgar medal. However it was packed with stories and insight into the area in the 18th and 19th century. What a fantastic piece of research! The Royal Navy was the largest employer of free black labour at the time in Britain however the hospital did not record the race of new pensioners just their county of origin so it isn’t clear how many of them were black. It is likely that many registered as American were black former slaves. The show pointed out that in the navy all the sailors lived equally on board ship and probably at the hospital, rank was more important than race. As pensioners could live in or out of the hospital in ...

Lovely exhibition at the Queen’s House of pictures and artefacts from Woburn Abbey on loan while the Abbey is being refurbished. The stunning loans are scattered around the Queen’s House’s own collection so you do have to play spot the exhibit at bit but they are all marked with a label with the Abbey’s symbol on it and there is a handy guide to   tell you what is in each room. Highlight’s must be a Rembrandt and a possible self portrait of Frans Hals. I missed a Claude and had to go back and find it along with a Gainsborough landscape. The stars were the portraits and the stories that went with them. In the first room you are introduced to the son of the 4th Earl of Bedford via is portrait by Reynolds, who did the Grand Tour but died just two years later before he had unpacked all of his purchases. These were found 40 years later, still in their crates, by his son. I also loved a portrait of the same man’s wife by Reynolds in the outfit she wore as a bridesmaid to Queen Cha...

Small exhibition at the Queen’s House focusing on the Armada Portraits of Elizabeth I. Unfortunately one of the original three pictures, the National Portrait Gallery one, has gone on tour to Japan but it will be back again in the Spring so I’ll have to go again. It was still interesting to see the other two, from the National Maritime Gallery’s own collection and from Woburn, together to make comparisons. There were good information boards which highlighted who probably owned the pictures and the symbolism in them. It is now known who painted them but they are all based on an approved miniature by Hilliard. They were nicely displayed in an installation style room with a soundscape called “A Proposal for Radical Hospitality” by Peter Adajye based on African call and response which used the acoustics of the room and created a good ambiance for viewing the pictures. Reviews Times Guardian Evening Standard Closes 2021

Fascinating online interview from the Art Newspaper with Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics analysing how the art market has been affected by the Covid crisis. This was the last session in a series on the art market "New Models for New Times: Rethinking the Art Market in a Changing World" in which McAndrew was interviewed by Georgina Adam, editor-at-large of the Arts Newspaper. McAndrew took us through various charts and graphs of how the marker has reacted to the crisis. She felt the worse performers were the mid-range galleries selling at $250-500K with all galleries sales being down an average of 30%. Auction sales were down 50% in value compared to the previous year but partly because the number of lots were down. She compared the real and online markets, with online obviously increasing with online sales making up 37% of sales this year as opposed to 10% the year before. They then discussed how the galleries and auction houses had adapted to the issues and reflected ...

Fun online lecture from the National Gallery looking at how artists tell stories in paintings. Ed Dickenson used example from the gallery to analyse different ways to tell a story in a painting. We started with artists who chose to paint a moment in time, hinting at what had gone before and was to come. We spent most time on Ruben’s “Judgement of Paris” from the 1630s and he made us look at it afresh and define where and when it was set, why the people were and what was happening. He showed us how to decode the people and the narrative then to think about the moment in the story the artist had chosen to show. We then looked at two types of picture which tried to show a tale over time. Using Ugolino di Nerio’s “The Betrayal of Christ” from the 1320s to think about how an artist could use the predella at the bottom of an altarpiece to tell as story over a series of pictures like a cartoon. We then looked at Pontormo’s “Joseph with Jacob in Egypt” from 1518 as an example of a continu...

Joyful exhibition at Eames Fine Art of new work by Anita Klein. The power of the colour in these pictures pulls you into the gallery and you can’t help but smile at these joyful pictures of women swimming or getting ready to swim. The ripples on the water have shades of 1960s Hockney swimming pools but instead of beautiful young men these contented women in bright costumes bob happily in the water and smile at you as they get ready to dive in.  I can’t swim but they make me want to join them, maybe just for the cup of tea afterwards! Closes 1 November 2020  

Beautiful exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey of new work by Danh Vo. The exhibition had made the whole gallery and the square outside into a calming installation merging ecclesiastical salvage with planting and working wood burning stoves. That description doesn’t do it justice. I love the way, from the dark entrance on, you had a sense of wondering what you were going to find. From there you cold smell the wood burners and you could also feel the heat from one as you walked up the central corridor towards a room with a tree in it. What’s not to love!  My favourite room, shown here, you peer into over a pile of logs, which turn out to be an American flag which has collapsed. Once in the room there are artfully arranged fragments of statutes lit from above, often incorporating live and dead plants alongside larger rounds beds of plants. One wall was made up old architectural features presumably. from their ornateness, from a church. I have no idea what it meant even after wat...