What an enchanting show! It’s a joy to visit the National Gallery and ‘Discover Constable and the Hay Wain’. This picture has graced millions of biscuit tins and chocolate boxes but there’s so much more to the image. Fascinating to see the painting in the context of a contemporary painter of the 1820s channelling the aesthetic of traditional landscape painting and establishing a British school of landscape. Fabulous
Francis Bacon: Human Presence. A very impressive new show at the National Portrait Gallery brings together over 50 of his paintings and includes fascinating photographs of him at work in his studio and fragments of the images and source material which inspired him. It is a visceral experience. Bacon aimed to captures the essence of his subject, not bothering with a direct likeness, but depicting what he feels about them.
Turner Prize 2024 on show at Tate Britain. I enjoyed the press preview today. Three female one male artist represent the contemporary work being judged for this price. Very contrasting work from Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur and Delane Le Bas. Always interesting to see what’s happening.
Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy. There’s an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ feel to this exhibition where everyday objects, graphically outlined and painted with eye-popping colours are celebrated on canvas, as wall-sculpture, digital art and drawings. Astounding.
Van Gogh Poets & Lovers. This is the first time the National Gallery has staged a substantial exhibition of Vincent’s art and wow, it is quite the blockbuster show. We see spectacular work created during his time in Arles in the south of France (1888-1890) battling poor mental health, working with fellow artists and depicting the people, places and landscapes that surrounded him.
Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look A great little exhibition in Room 46 celebrating David Hockney’s admiration of The Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca (about 1437-45) and showing how this painting influenced our greatest living artist and features in two influential paintings from 1977.
So good to be back at the National Portrait Gallery for the press launch of the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award. Fifty portraits were selected from over 40,000 entries from all over the world. The results are fascinating, full of variety and made with many different media – but all involving traditional material such as oil, acrylic, tempera. And it’s always fun to meet the artists and some of the subjects too.
Mythic Time / Tens of Thousands of Rememberings by Lina Iris Victor. And what a fascinating exhibition at the Sir John Soane’s Museum this is. A celebration of African culture, mingled with inspiration from the astonishing collection of ancient artefacts assembled by Sir John Soane and housed in his idiosyncratic home in Lincoln’s Inn Field, London.
Paper Places 