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It’s always interesting to see what artists can do with recycled and found materials. This is very apparent at the newly opened show at Royal Academy called Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers. It features a collection of work which has (mostly) been collected by William Arnett (1939-2020) who set up the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.

The work on show was all made by Black artists from the Southern states of America born between 1887 and 1965. These artists had little opportunity for conventional art training; they lived in close-knit neighbourhoods and created their work from bits and pieces they found lying around and could be used to create sculptures and wall art as well as installations. It felt quite ‘outsider art’ in many ways but rather than a solo artist evolving in isolation this is a movement. Many of the artists are descended from enslaved people in communities in South Caroline down to the Mississippi River.

The works are imaginative and heartfelt. I particularly liked the Gee’s Bend quilts – quilting is such a tradition of early America and these were made with every spare scrap of material.

The materials used include clay and sand, bits of old machinery, twigs, paper and old tin cans. I admire the way the creative mind will see seemingly disposable or obsolete objects and turn them into an artwork.

The show is on at the Royal Academy from 17th March until 18th June 2023

It’s always a joy to visit Collect. The show now seems really comfortable at its new home at Somerset House. Touring the corridors and dipping into the different rooms is like a magical mystery tour. You never know what you’re going to encounter. And I was lucky enough to go to the Press Preview and meet some of the creators of the pieces. That’s always a bonus.

This is Olga Prinku, an artist who uses dried flowers and twigs to create her art. These pieces are beguilingly beautiful. Pleasing from a distance they are fascinating to look at close up. The twigs are from birch trees in her garden. She says she’s always pleased when there’s a big wind because it means her material is easy to gather.

This is Greg Kent who does astonishing things with oak. The pieces are finely sliced and then sandblasted to take out the new growth revealing a natural filigree pattern.

This is Iseabal Hendry with one of her leather and wood log baskets. Really, too beautiful to used in such a prosaic way when all you want to do is admire way she has formed the shapes using boat-building skills. She is on show at the Craft Scotland stand along with gorgeous hangings by Eve Campbell.

Always amazing to see what can be done with glass. This dazzling piece is on show in the Peter Layton London Glassblowing room.

Just look at this magnificence! It’s the VIP room at Somerset House which was designed and furnished by Cox London. A very comfy place to hang out and meet friends!

I’m just going to finish with a pick and mix of photos I took of things which caught my eye. Collect 2023 is on until 5th March and well worth a visit.

I’ve never really spent time up close and personal with Donatello before but it was a real treat to see the work on display at the V&A. We’re having something of a Donatello Fest at the moment with great shows to be see in Berlin and Florence. He was a very productive artist. Clearly patrons kept him permanently busy and it must have been thrilling to take delivery of one of his sculptures or paintings to put on display in your private chapel.

Donatello brings such emotion into his work; you absolutely feel the intensity of the relationship between the Madonna and child.The one on the right feels so stylised and modern but the bond is so strong.

It was difficult to get a good shot of this bust but it is so impressive to see in the round. He’s created a portrait of a living person, one imagines with his head in a familiar pose. The painting of the terracotta brings a dynamic feel to the piece. Apparently it’s of the Lord Mayor of Florence, made around 1455-60.

The full size statues are so impressive, whether in bronze or marble. On the left is a painted cast of Donatello’s David, made in 1885 from the original made in about 1386-1466. And the marble sculpture on the right is St John the Baptist. The delicate carving of the tunic is breathtaking.

Such tenderness to be seen in these Madonna and Child sculptures.You feel he’s really studied the expression of infants and the way a baby boy will chew on a finger or instinctively wrap his arms around his mother’s neck.

Faces are so well crafted in Donatello’s hands. Some of them are stylised and representative but some are most definitely of real people. The eyebrows and details of features are modelled so sensitively.

This great show is on at the Victoria and Albert Museum until 11 June 2023. Supported by Rocco Forte Hotels.

It’s quite an audacious thing to create an exhibition which purports to represent a nation – and a world culture too. At the Royal Academy a new exhibition fills the main galleries with a vast sweep of Spanish and Hispanic art gathered from Spain, South America and around the world. The collection was built up in New York by members of the Hispanic Society who made it their role in life to buy and preserved examples of quality Spanish and Hispanic Art.

There are many unusual artworks created for the church included in the collection. I was very drawn to the carved wooden busts, the truly weird mixed media impression of the Wedding at Cana made with mother of pearl and the curious proportions of El Greco’s St Jerome.

I did like the little sketches by Goya. One is of a woman with her small children – clearly a loving maternal portrait – and the the other one is of a girl checking her clothes for fleas. I feel sure there’s quite a back story to that picture!

This portrait of a family in a very lusciously illustrated manuscript really impressed me. Apologies for the rather out of focus photo. But the couple and the child look so remarkably good that they must have been painted from life.

Into the 20th century and the art becomes freer and more expressive. I really liked this painting of children wallowing in the shallows by Joaquin Sorolla from 1908. The composition is wonderful and the impression of wet bodies and small waves is so cleverly created.

Two group paintings caught my eye. On the left is The Family of the Gypsy Bullfighter by Ignacio Zuloaga from 1903 and on the right is Girls of Burriana from 1910 by Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa. The delight in the relationships and the sumptuous clothing make them a pleasure to view.

The show is on at the Royal Academy from 21st January to 10 April 2023.

I did come to this show when it first opened in early 2020 – but it was barely on for two weeks before the pandemic caused all galleries to shut and it was gone. I was impressed then but I was even more impressed at today’s press preview. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is still young (she was born in 1977 in London to Ghanaian parents) yet she has created a huge body of work and established an international reputation. It is so satisfying to see a figurative artist simply revelling in the act of painting. Yes, the paintings are of people and she does use photographs, cuttings from magazines and papers and collected images, but the finished works are not of people with a name. But, in a way, the very anonymity of these paintings invites the viewer to fill in the narrative, to give the figures a place in the world, a career, education, relationships and philosophy.

She likes to capture her figures in the action of thinking, being and doing. There’s a lot of movement to these subjects. And, best of all, she features the smile and the laugh. This is rare in portraiture mainly because it’s hard to find a sitter who will stay fixed in mid chuckle or amused gaze. This is where the photos for reference come in handy. But there’s nothing better than seeing someone in a painting looking directly at you, in your viewer’s space and engaging you in a shared thought.

The exhibition is not organised chronologically. The artist has worked with the curators to assemble paintings in galleries because of their shared gaze or situation, or dialogue. You can imagine all these fantasy people coming to life after the gallery is closed and chatting to each other with great energy and zest.

The painting technique interests me too. I look at them and see speed of work. This is, apparently, the case. Yiadom-Boakye does choose to work quickly. I can see that she starts on a white canvas or linen, uses great sweeps of red paint for the underdrawing and swiftly creates the image on top using dark tones but leaves little flecks of white and light to enliven the image. There is nothing laboured or detailed about these works yet you get just enough information. The gaze, the sense of engagement is very strong.

This is impressive to see at a 20 year mark. Who knows what the next 20 years will allow her to create!

Fly in League with the Night is on show at Tate Britain until 26th February 2023

As paper portrait person it’s always interesting to see what photographers do with their subjects. Rather than hours of ‘eyeballing’ they can watch their subject (s) carefully and then capture just the right moment. In this year’s Taylor Wessing Photographic Prize exhibition there’s real emphasis on the spontaneous and personal.

The winning photographs were of seemingly mundane images taken by Clementine Schneidermann of her neighbour from the series Laundry Day. It shows that you don’t have to do close up portraits in perfect focus but you can capture the essence of a person from a distance and, in this case, during lockdown.

I like a photograph with a sense of narrative and was very taken by this one which shows a grandmother and granddaughter in the family kitchen. The grandmother has dementia and you can tell from her eyes that she is not ‘seeing’ things in the same way. Yet the child is all coiled energy ready to jump up and get on with her life. It’s by Helen Rimell from the series entitled No Longer Her(e).

Above is a portrait by Ed Alcock of Valerie Bacot. This woman had endured years of abuse at the hands of her step-father and then her husband. Her life’s history is one of unbearable pain and suffering. After 24 years of physical and psychological violence she shot and killed her husband and was sentenced to four years in prison, with three years suspended. As she had already spent one year in pre-trial detention she was free from that day onwards.

Here are just a few more of the portraits which caught my eye. It’s a very interesting show and a great opportunity to visit the impressive exhibition space at Cromwell Road in South Kensington. The National Portrait Gallery is currently undergoing a redevelopment and won’t be open until next year.

The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2022 at Cromwell Place is on until 18th December 2022

Well, why shouldn’t a lobster be used as part of a telephone? Salvador Dali was very much the high priest of the surrealist movement in the 1920s and 30s. Both artists and designers at the time asked themselves the question – does the object I’m making have to be functional or literal or can I introduce a wild idea into the making of this and beguile the viewer? I do like the playful approach of these makers and thinkers who realised that you don’t always have to follow the rules. For contemporary artists and designers this feels like a natural state of things, especially when we are all thinking so keenly about reusing and recycling. Why not use left over glass, metal or wood to create a piece.

These are all functional objects but they’ve been elevated by a kind of surreal idealism. Jasper Morrison uses elements of a bicycle to create his table, Gaudi uses gorgeous carved lines in wood to create chair which looks set to embrace you, Kiesler came up with a rocking chair idea which can transform into a table and Danny Lane’s Etruscan Chair uses broken glass combined with industrial pipes.

This is a Piece of Cheese, (Ceci est un morceau de fromage) 1936, is scribbled on the back of this painting by Magritte, of the picture set inside the glass cloche. It’s witty and clever and is the start of artists’ views that you can use the everyday, the mass-produced and the hum-drum to make a statement and create art.

I was very taken by this lighting installation by Nacho Carbonell made from left over scraps of material found in his studio. It’s metal mesh and plaster but looks so ethereal.

Great to see artists from the first half of the last century represented. On the left is Quadriga by Eileen Agar (1935) and on the right an intriguing painting by Le Corbusier from 1954, clearly still in cubist thrall. He was a painter before turning to architecture.

Objects of Desire is on at the Design Museum until 19th February 2023 and it’s fascinating show.

So this is the famous engraving of King Charles I immediately after he has been beheaded. We see cheering, jeering and also weeping. It seems that executions were the main opportunity people had to express their emotions in public and, dare I say it, to ‘enjoy’ the spectacle.

The Museum of London has assembled quantities of artefacts relating to executions: beheadings, burnings, hangings and all the other horrible things that man felt it was acceptable to do unto man in the name of punishment. And, for centuries, there were around 200 crimes which attracted the death penalty. Without a police force or strong justice system you could argue that deterrent was the best way of keeping men and women away from crime. But it didn’t work that way and, as we see from some of the sad letters written by prisoners on death row in the 1700s, they might protest their innocence to the end but were sent to the gallows anyway.

Below is my photo of the blue shift which is said to have been worn by Charles I on the day of his execution. I’ve also added a tiny token painted with his image which was kept by a supporter after his death. Holding onto items like this would have been extremely dangerous, if discovered, and it’s remarkable that these objects have come through careful curating to the Museum.

The exhibition takes you on a tour of all the hideous ways of putting people to death. One does feel a bit queasy afterwards but also very enlightened about the history of ‘justice’ and the bravery of people who endured these public endings whether they deserved it or not.

There was certainly a ‘business’ to these events. The paintings of criminals or executions would be made into the prints and sold to the benefit of the artists. You could buy a broadsheet on the day of a hanging and find out about the crimes committed and the history of the miscreant.

The exhibition is on at the Museum of London in Docklands until 16th April 2023. It’s not for the fainthearted and the overwhelming feeling of cruelty is something you carry away with you. But this was life as it was lived for many centuries. It’s amazing to think that the death sentence in the UK was ended in the 1960s – in my lifetime! We have moved on in terms of our understanding of human nature, of crime and of ways of either rehabilitating people who’ve committed crimes or being ready to lock them up away from our society for ever.

Below, check out the heads on spikes at the entrance to old London Bridge.

Above, the door from Newgate Prison through which the condemned prisoner would have walked to the gallows. Makes me shiver to look at it.

I liked this early Self-portrait with Hyacinth from 1948 made on paper through painstaking use of pencil and crayon. The draughtsmanship is impressive and the stylistic influence of Cedric Morris, an early tutor, is clear to see.

It was interesting hear the curator, Daniel Hermann, talk about this show at the press preview. By all accounts Freud was an unashamedly selfish man who put his art and his focus on work above all relationships. He had many lovers and several of them have been immortalised in his paintings, but they would always be dropped or fade away while the commitment to painting prevailed.

Above is Girl with Roses. It’s a portrait of Freud’s first wife, Kathleen (Kitty) Garman. Freud has created a very gorgeous surface of paint through many thin layers and careful detailing. You can see the reflection of the sash windows in the studio space reflected in her eyes.

Above is Hotel Bedroom painted in 1954. The woman in the bed is Lady Caroline Blackwood, his then wife. Apparently the pair collaborated on the creation of the piece with lengthy poses, arrangements of the composition and a shared investment in the atmosphere of the piece. It smacks of the end of a relationship but it’s still ambiguous and hard to read.

Above is a self-portrait studiedly left unfinished, so that we, the viewer can admire the finished painted part but also read the whole story, and where the artist could have gone, but didn’t feel the need to go.

As the decades wear on Freud completely changes his style. Gone are the thin layers of paint and tiny, detailed brushstrokes. We start seeing monumental paintings made with impasto paint, thickly applied with broad, bristle brushes and bold lines. So begins a series of nudes (Freud often nude himself) using curious angles and perspectives.

There are several familiar paintings in this show and quite a few which have not been viewed before. I was interested to see this early painting (below) entitled The Refugees which seems primitive but is deftly made. This group of curious men and women, oddly dressed all stare directly out at us. We, the viewer, can provide the narrative.

This watercolour portrait of Freud’s mother, late in her life, shows a woman of intense intelligence and resolution. It’s one of Freud’s later works and interesting to see the tenderness in the image through use of a different medium.

Lucien Freud, New Perspectives is at the National Gallery until 23rd January 2023.

Think of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) and you may well think of a still life and all those rosy red and green apples assembled with household objects in studio set ups. Oh, but there’s so much more to Cezanne and this exhibition takes you on a biographical journey from his early days as an artist developing his style right through to late paintings which revisit places and subjects which fascinated and challenged him during his life.

I couldn’t resist this line-up of still life paintings. They’re just a selection of the many on show. What’s so striking is the very considered and original composition and use of perspective. There’s really bold brushwork too. You can see that he’s playing with the conventions of perception, observing the objects from more than one angle and incorporating surprising viewpoints and colour combinations.

I’m so pleased that many of Cezanne’s portraits have been assembled for this show. There’s a real variety but they are all astonishing to view. I’ve been fond of the easy-looking, relaxed portrait of The Gardener Vallier (bottom left in the gallery above) for years. I feel it must have been painted very quickly on a sunny afternoon and both men enjoyed a conversation while the painting was made. Bottom right is an unfinished portrait of Paul, his son, which shows how Cezanne was experimenting with colour to create the child’s skin tones and, again, working against the clock to capture an impression of the sleeping child.

The paintings of Monte Sainte-Victoire (right and left) represented a real departure for Cezanne. His aim was to capture a moment in time, the way the sun illuminated the distant mountain and how shadows create depth and emphasise the terrain in front of him. It’s very telling that many of the paintings on show were owned by fellow artists such as Monet, Pissaro, Gaugin and Picasso. Clearly Cezanne’s originality and bravery in having the confidence to depict the world in a new way inspired contemporary painters who loved observing these works and letting the ideas seep into their own work.

Cezanne’s figures have a sculptural and monumental feeling about them. Apparently he was loath to make drawings and paintings from life-models but clearly he has worked collaboratively with a model to achieve the composition of these groups of bathers. The use of paint in the oil version (left) gives the scene a rather threatening feel. Are those storm clouds in the distance? It’s so interesting to see the contrast with the watercolour version (right).

I’ll end this very brief assessment of a hugely enjoyable show, with this large oil painting of a big bouquet of flowers. It’s described as ‘unfinished’ but then that’s what gives the painting its freshness and energy. It’s so different from the highly wrought and polished floral still life paintings made by Dutch artists a century earlier. Seeing the bare, unpainted canvas and the rapidly scrubbed brush marks brings the whole image to life in such a satisfying and energetic way.

This is a wonderful show. It’s on at Tate Modern until 12th March 2023 and is a rare treat indeed.