Tag: painting
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On a Headland of Lava Beside You
Joanna Kirk and I are both artists living in Blackheath and have become good friends over time as our children are the same age, friends and at school together. This has led to frequent conversations with us sharing books (for example Karl Ove Knausgaard’s) and views on exhibitions and artists, on newspaper articles and TV…
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Binbag, Pavement Tree, Chainlink Fence
Dandelions poking through a chainlink fence; brambles sprouting from an unknown corner; a binbag gashed open, spewing out its contents; scattered leaves; a dead fly. Mimei Thompson paints the everyday and the overlooked. She imbues commonplace subject matter with a sense of strangeness. She works fast, with transclucent oil paint on very smooth, white, non-absorbent…
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Red Snow
Albedo is the fraction of solar energy reflected from the Earth back into space. The word stems from Latin and means whiteness. Ice, with snow on top of it, has a very high albedo. Red snow describes an area of ice polluted, as it were, with red algae. Red algae is typically a mix of…
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Scenes from an Execution Variations
Few things are as messy as war. Cause and effect, right and wrong: our foundational truths unravel in the face of violence and bloodshed. This has not always been the case when it comes to the art of war. Classical depictions of war were grand, complex compositions, often mythological or generalised. In medieval times, the…
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Ravilious
Fashions in art have a way of carrying all before them. They crash into the public consciousness, all splash and spectacle, and it is all too easy, in the rage to reorder and make sense of what ensues, to take epoch-making headlines for the whole story. It is under these conditions that a talent like…
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The Home Hairdresser, Wakefield
Holding her hair over the sink, the water runs red; it trickles down her temple. It gets on lunch’s dirty plates. The towels are black, the floor beige. Don’t touch your head, you’ll get pink fingers! Put these gloves on, and just comb it out whilst I finish off Emma’s fringe. It splashes. Hair fragments…
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From the Foreshore
This March sees an exhibition of large-scale drawings by Sophie Charalambous hosted by curator and gallerist Jessica Carlisle. The works on show capture the strange energy of the Thames foreshore – a place of washed out tones and washed up objects. Timeless characters pick through the sedimentary layers of history; silver and black flows past…
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A Needle Walks into a Haystack
Sound carries. And it is the sounds of political and social unrest that offer one of the most interesting threads for navigating this year’s Liverpool Biennial – a constellation of exhibitions, events and curatorial side-shows grouped under the title, A Needle Walks into a Haystack. The Biennial’s greatest achievement is its power to make you…
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Travelling with Unfamiliar Spirits
Taking place this October – just in time for Hallowe’en – is a two-week festival of esoteric art, entitled I:MAGE 2014, that promises to explore the fertile relationship between artists and spirit entities. If the world of the esoteric can often seem closed off (almost by definition) then I:MAGE 2014 goes some way towards breaking…
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Trevor Kiernander
It wasn’t until he told me that I made the connection. I’m not sure whether I should tell you though. Whether it changes the experience of seeing too much. Knowing that many images are abstracted from photographs. From thumbnails of Tracey Emin taken from the BBC news website. From a photograph of his girlfriend, laughing…
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Turner and the Sea
Given that Joseph Mallord William Turner is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of the sea in the history of British art, it seems slightly strange that Turner and the Sea – just opened at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich – is the first full-scale exhibition devoted to this aspect of…