COULD we be looking to artists to lead us into the new Eden? The thought occurred as I asked six well-established gallery owners which of their contemporary artists are currently most in-demand and why their work is striking a particular chord.
Covid-19, it seems, has intensified what was already a growing interest in works inspired by the natural world, with landscape painting—in an echo of its flowering after the First World War—proving particularly popular, together with botanical art and other works on environmental themes.
‘People are sitting at home looking out of their windows. Landscape means so much to us; we’re British, we can’t help it. It’s a metaphor for everything,’ says Johnny Messum of Messums London and Wiltshire (www.messumswiltshire.com), whose two recent exhibitions of works by artist and environmentalist Kurt Jackson—watery scenes that explore fragile landscapes as they change over time—have been sell-outs.
‘There’s so much anxiety and uncertainty at the moment, people are turning to art to help lead them through,’ says Sarah Long, co-director of the London gallery Long & Ryle (www.longandryle.com). ‘We’re looking for paintings that feel optimistic, but also that have a depth, even a certain spirituality or sense of longing.’ She singles out John Monks, whose recent painting Distant Landscape, rendered in thick impasto, the paint poured on and scraped with a palette knife, the surface glazed in layers, views its subject from a huge, ambiguous space filled with shafts of light: ‘Never before has he connected the light within and beyond with such weighted contemplation and relevance.’
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der June 03, 2020-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der June 03, 2020-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
