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The painter expresses sadness at how social media, Covid and new buildings have made it a challenge to find places to create art
The far south-west of Britain has long been regarded as a wild and romantic spot, a place where you can lose yourself in rugged landscapes beloved of artists and dreamers.
But a renowned Cornish-based artist celebrated for his images of the world’s great wildernesses has expressed sadness and frustration that social media, new building and the rush to the countryside caused by Covid has made it a challenge to find remote, lonesome places in his backyard to paint.
Continue reading...When Susan Ogilvy starting painting nests in her garden she realised there were few pictorial accounts of these complex creations
One day about five years ago, while she was clearing up her Somerset garden after a storm, Susan Ogilvy found a curious object under a fir tree. “I had no idea what it was,” she recalls of the small, sodden green lump. “It clearly hadn’t grown naturally; it had been made by something. I picked it up and brought it inside and put it on a wodge of newspaper and, as the weight of water drained out of it, it sprang up into this absolutely fantastic nest.”
Her immediate response to her discovery – an unfinished chaffinch nest as it turned out – was to sit down and paint it. Ogilvy, a veteran botanical illustrator, had recently published a book about tree leaves, but on this occasion she was painting “just for the sheer pleasure of it”. She chuckles: “I didn’t know anything about nests. I was one of those people who thought of them as little twiggy things.”
Continue reading...Wallace Collection, London
Revered by Manet and Van Gogh, scorned by Kenneth Clark, the great 17th-century portraitist captures each sitter in the moment with astonishing force and freedom
The brewer is mighty: a man of outsize prowess looking down on you with all his shrewd vigour, satin doublet straining to contain his huge girth. The hat is so large it has its own planetary halo; the lace collar could cover a table. It is not hard to imagine the awful strength of his grip.
He was the owner of the Swan’s Neck brewery, this gentleman of Haarlem. But he was also a lavish collector of Dutch portraits, and none can have exceeded this one. From the affable yet undeceived eyes to the reddening jowls, the shaggy pelt of hair to the elbow jutting out of the frame in a dazzle of creased satin, everything is painted with an apt and equivalent force. The portrait rises to meet the man at every turn.
Continue reading...The extraordinary west London home of the late architect Charles Jencks is nothing short of the built embodiment of his teeming postmodern ideas. And now we’re all welcome
“A failure of recent architecture,” wrote the critic, theorist and architect Charles Jencks 45 years ago, “has been one of communication.” He believed buildings should speak, that they should mean something to their inhabitants and passersby. “An architect’s primary and final role,” he also said, “is to express the meanings a culture finds significant.”
Jencks himself loved to communicate. He liked to talk, to debate, to disagree. He was a maniacal book engine, elaborating and (sometimes) elucidating his theories in publication after publication over a period of 40-plus years. He was sociable and witty. He and his wife, the garden designer Maggie Keswick, were generous and public-spirited: the UK’s Maggie’s cancer centres, conceived by them while she was dying of the disease, bear witness.
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The removal of Gen Robert E Lee’s statue – a target for Black Lives Matter protesters – from Monument Avenue has sparked a debate on public art in Virginia
All but one plinth is now bare on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia.
Where once stood enormous statues glorifying Confederate leaders, on a thoroughfare that memorialized a white supremacist past in the former capital of the Confederacy, there is now empty space. The only monument that remains is of a black man: the Richmond native and renowned tennis player and activist Arthur Ashe.
Continue reading...Long-held doubts about the authenticity of the National Gallery’s masterpiece, bought for £2.5m in 1980, are backed by pioneering technology
The National Gallery has always given pride of place to Peter Paul Rubens’s Samson and Delilah, listing it among the “highlights” of its collection, since it purchased the picture at Christie’s in 1980 for a then record price.
It depicts the Old Testament hero in the lap of the lover who betrayed him, having beguiled him into revealing that his God-given strength lay in his uncut hair. As Samson sleeps, Delilah’s accomplice cuts his locks, rendering him powerless, with soldiers ready at the door to capture him.
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Londoner Nadine Ijewere cheerfully explodes the industry’s narrow notions of beauty with an image that typifies her work
Nadine Ijewere grew up in Peckham in south-east London and until she picked up a camera in sixth form she planned to study medicine. At school, there was a darkroom where she could process film and the excitement of watching the colours of her first rolls come to life changed her career path and won her a place at the London College of Fashion. At weekends, she and friends would get suitcases full of clothes from their wardrobes and drag them to the local park to dress up and have fun; she was the designated photographer. Within a few years, she was much in demand, shooting a campaign for Stella McCartney in Lagos, seeing some of her pictures of siblings exhibited at Tate Britain; in 2018, aged only 26, she made headlines as the first woman of colour to shoot a cover for Vogue, with a photograph featuring Dua Lipa and celebrating “the future”.
Ijewere took this image for the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ. Magazine in 2019, in a fashion feature devoted to the spring dress. Its energy is typical of her work, which is collected in a new monograph called Our Own Selves. The photos demonstrate her commitment to cheerfully exploding any narrow ideas of beauty that the fashion industry still clings to. Interviewed for her book, Ijewere talks about how, “when I started exploring photography in the magazines I’d flick through, I would think to myself, ‘Well…’ I never saw anyone that really looked like my friends or anyone I could relate to in those images. If they were people of colour or Black women, they were all light-skinned and had European features. If they had curly hair, it was blow-dried straight to match the white women. None of my friends really looked like that.”
Continue reading...In a new photo series tracing her 90-year-old mother-in-law’s memory loss, Jennifer Blau aims to break down the stigma associated with the disease
During the pandemic last year, photographer and art therapist Jennifer Blau was looking for a project to work on. She turned to her mother-in-law, Patricia, who is 90 years old.
“She was elegant, intelligent, glamorous,” Blau tells Guardian Australia. “She was always out, and involved in the arts. I wanted to document that in a woman at 90.”
Continue reading...The artist, 74, talks about embracing mortality, her purely emotional art, spirituality and communism, and sex getting better after the menopause
I’ll be 75 in November. My grandmother, who lived to be 103, told me that 70 is when life starts to be really interesting. You’re free to do whatever you want, you have all the wisdom to do that. What sucks is if you’re sick; but if you’re healthy then life at this stage is incredibly enjoyable.
I think about dying every single day. It’s only when you think about dying that you fully enjoy your life. It means you can’t bullshit; everything that’s not important falls away, and you know death can happen any minute, any time – you are in the last act. You have to think about what you’re going to leave society: as an artist you have that obligation. Because if you have a gift, you have to handle it carefully. The gift isn’t given to you personally, it’s given to you to give to society. You have to think carefully about how you’re going to leave meaningful work behind.
Continue reading...Madinah Farhannah Thompson’s art is informed by her experience as a black primary schoolchild
Growing up as one of the only black pupils at her primary school in Norwich, Madinah Farhannah Thompson says she felt isolated and that it affected her mental health.
Now the artist is using her complicated experience with the countryside in her work, which grapples with themes of rejection and racism felt by black people in rural areas.
Continue reading...‘That the young girl in the foreground was a soldier with a gun on her knee is an integral part of that moment’
Dina Alfasi has often said that her favourite place to shoot is on the train. It’s not only a mobile studio with, as she puts it, great natural light and interesting subjects; it also lends itself to contemplation, to being in the moment.
The Israeli photographer was on her way to work in Haifa, Israel when this baby started laughing. It was 8am, on a June morning. The child was seated on the table: the rolling landscape beyond the window and the young women on the seats opposite vying for her attention. When they got her to laugh, the whole coach joined in. “There was a dreamy sense of joy,” Alfasi says, “a pure moment of unity and innocence.” It is that feeling she sought to retain with any image adjustments – the gentle colour, the Magritte clouds, the painterly highlights along chin and cheek. That the young woman in the foreground was a soldier with a gun on her knee is an integral part of that moment.
Continue reading...Serious themes are undercut by the flippant tone of this story about a Syrian refugee who becomes a conceptual art object
Here is a muddled caper of movie that doesn’t know what it wants to say; it doesn’t work as a satire of the international art market, nor as a commentary on the racism of white European culture. And its attitude to Syria is undermined by a silly and unconvincing ending that leaves a strange taste in the mouth. It is inspired by the Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye and his human artwork called Tim: in 2008, Delvoye tattooed an elaborate punk-crucifixion scene on the back of a Zurich tattoo parlour owner named Tim Steiner, who in return for a cash payment agreed to sit still with his tattooed back on show in galleries for a certain number of times a year and have his tattooed skin surgically removed and put on display after his death. And of course it is this macabre destiny that lends fascination to the ongoing live events.
This movie from writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania imagines a Syrian man, Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni) in love with a well-born woman Abeer (Dea Liane). But when he is wrongfully arrested by the tyrannical Assad government, Abeer’s family pressures her into marrying a smooth diplomat, Ziad (Saad Lostan), who takes her to live with him in Brussels where he is an embassy attache. Sam Ali manages to escape from police custody (the least of the film’s implausibilities) and get over the border into Lebanon where, hungry and hard up, he gatecrashes art exhibitions and gobbles the free canapes. And this is where he is approached by a preeningly arrogant artist, Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen De Bouw), who looks like Roger De Bris, the theatre director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers. If Sam will agree to the humiliation of having a massive “Schengen visa” tattooed on his back, then Jeffrey will be legally able to transport him to Brussels as a conceptual art object rather than a human being, as part of a show about the commodification of humanity, and Sam will be able to see Abeer.
Continue reading...Thanks to an online search error, an architect transformed a tumbledown building into a three-bedroom house
Melanie Schubert and partner Paolo Vimercati didn’t set out to buy a derelict double garage when they were looking for a new home. In one online search, Schubert forgot to include a minimum value – “and this was the cheapest property you could buy here”, she says. As architects, the couple realised that, with planning permission, this seven-metre-square plot with no garden in south-east London might just be a route to the best possible home for their budget.
Continue reading...Whether it is a live gig, a new film or a game to play at home, our critics have your plans for this week covered
Continue reading...Haitian migrants attempt to reach the US, the Taliban in Kabul, wildfires in California and tributes to Jimmy Greaves – the most striking images from around the world this week
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In 1982 Peter Adams finished a photography course in Australia. As the celebratory drinks flowed an idea materialised that would take him on a journey spanning 374,592km (he did the maths) around the world. The purpose of this grand endeavour was to photograph and interview some of the world’s best-known photographers. Thirty-nine years later the result is being bound at the printers in the form of a book that documents 300 of the world’s most prolific photographers
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Activists marched on cities around the world to demand action on climate change before Cop26 in Glasgow
Continue reading...Printmaking genius Hokusai is at the British Museum, the Turner comes to Coventry, and ancient nomads pitch up in Cambridge – all in your weekly dispatch
Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything
A unique cache of drawings by one of the world’s best-loved artists offers a closer look at the genius who created the Great Wave.
• British Museum, London, from 30 September
Partnership with new platform LaCollection aims to inspire next generation of art collectors
The British Museum is venturing into the emerging world of non-fungible tokens by partnering with a new platform to launch digital postcards of the work of Katsushika Hokusai.
NFTs – unique digital assets stored on the blockchain – have gripped the arts sector since the digital artist Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, made history in March by selling an NFT for $69.4m.
Continue reading...The UK’s first ever cancer research exhibition pairs up patients with researchers to show the creative paths taken on the cutting edge of human discovery
Shortly before the pandemic hit, I found myself dressed in a red lab coat, trying to find a cure for blood cancer. Although that might be overstating things a little. It’s Professor Dominique Bonnet who is at the cutting edge of cancer research, whereas I was just tagging along for a day at the Francis Crick Institute, hoping to get a feel for what a career in the laboratory looks like.
It was a fascinating experience, especially seeing how Bonnet’s work could be surprisingly hands-on. I learned that she uses sponges of collagen in her research because the material is so similar to the bone marrow in which our blood cells are made. By dipping these tiny sponges into human stromal cells and then inserting them into the backs of mice to develop naturally, scientists are better able to monitor how cancer progresses and reacts to certain interventions. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the sponges can be removed afterwards, leaving the mice unharmed, although of course other cancer research is not able to be as humane.
Continue reading...Hannes Coudenys’ Ugly Belgian Houses updated with more from the ‘chaos known as Belgium’
Ever since he was a child, Hannes Coudenys had been annoyed by the “visual chaos” around him. On the road from home to his school in Bruges, he found a mishmash of architectural styles – haciendas, villas, farm-style houses, all mixed up with boxy malls and carpet shops.
One day, as an adult, still exasperated, he took a photo of a house that was split into two jarringly different styles: a grey urban semi whose other half was a jaunty brick cottage. He put the photo online with the title “ugly Belgian houses” and an internet trend was born.
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Yahya Mahayni, the Syrian star of The Man Who Sold His Skin, discusses Kaouther Ben Hania’s Oscar-nominated work, depictions of refugees on screen and working with Monica Bellucci
The first thing we see in The Man Who Sold His Skin is human hide: flayed, framed and transformed into an artwork. Gloved hands present the canvas of painted skin at auction in all its gruesome glory. It belongs to Sam Ali, a Syrian refugee and fugitive who agrees to have his back tattooed by a conceptual artist in a Faustian exchange for a European visa that turns him into a human artwork, exhibited on gallery plinths and gawped at by the world.
“That was actually a replica of my skin in the opening scene,” says Yahya Mahayni, the Syria-born actor who plays Sam. “They made a mould of my back with all its imperfections and then put it on pigskin because that looks like human skin.”
Continue reading...The small details catch photographer Sarah Lee’s eye at the late season show
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In an ambitious new installation, artist Refik Anadol used a 17,000 square-foot gallery to mount an immersive exhibit asking questions about online privacy
The trick of Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations, a three-day public art installation at The Shed in New York City, is to transform the processing of data into surreal hypnosis. The immersive audiovisual exhibit towers over a cavernous 17,000 sq ft gallery in Hudson Yards, an outer ring of screens features a shimmering and chameleonic display of what looks like pixelated sand. But each square is a narrative of data: a familiar image – tree, building, lamppost, over 130m publicly available images of New York City searched and collected by Anadol and his team’s algorithms – morphed into a single-colored square and then silenced by a single question: what would you do if you owned your data?
Related: ‘Some people feel threatened’: face to face with Ai-Da the robot artist
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