#stanley-spencer

#stanley-spencer

"Art became his antidote to pressure and frustration. An item like this brings us closer to those quiet creative moments away from the world."

Like half-remembered dreams, her curious pastoral visions displace familiarity in search of wilder fantasies, where humans are nowhere to be found. Against Nature, the London-based artist's second solo show at Pilar Corrias, establishes Wilson at the helm of a flourishing artistic engagement with the para-pastoral in contemporary painting. Hers is an altogether strange, uncanny variant of the British countryside that resists the canonical entrapments of a bucolic idyll.

In the story of art history-the art and artists, movements and trends-a select number of galleries have played a defining role in the evolution and trajectory of art itself. Among them, the Mayor Gallery in London is surely one, as it has maintained a position fostering and promoting some of the most significant developments in art for an astounding 100 years.

Euan Uglow, they say, is an artist's artist, and therein lies the problem. If you were approaching his painstaking canvases out of curiosity how to construct the figure, capture precise perspective, proportions I can see how their visible workings (complex little dashes and crosses and plumb lines and geometric grids) would prove revelatory. But lots of us come to art to be inspired, transported, to feel. And for all their technical prowess, Uglow's 70-odd regimented paintings at MK Gallery leave me cold.

Our perceptions of Seurat have usually been shaped by several vast canvases of Parisians enjoying life - who can forget Bathing, Asnières? - and the radical technique of painting he pioneered - often known as `pointillism' or `Neo-Impressionism'. Following the Impressionists and fascinated by new theories on optics and colour, Seurat placed pure dots of colour beside each other directly onto the canvas, so they melded together in the viewer's eye rather than blending them on a palette.

'trace] the evolution of the imagery of affection, seduction, conversation, male camaraderie and the sociability of the café and theatre, as well as merry-making, flirtation, courtship and child-rearing in Renoir's art'

Suddenly, on walks around London, I noticed that these poisonous plants were growing everywhere. Near my studio, I saw thorn apple, which is one of the most poisonous plants that grows wild in the U.K. Its sap is really poisonous. The plant was taller than me with these amazing, architectural, spiky seed pods. It looked so monstrous and intriguing, but I'd never noticed it until having done this reading.

In 2024, art collector Christian Levett opened Europe's first museum dedicated to women artists in a little town in the south of France. But for those of us who can't make the trip to the Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum, or FAMM), the American Federation of the Arts (AFA) has arranged the next best thing: a blockbuster touring exhibition about women artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement, featuring some of the highlights of the FAMM collection.

The studio is at my house within a ranch, surrounded by nature. It's on the second floor of the house, where there's better light. My routine all day shifts between studio work and housework, including outdoor garden work. I get up a bit before 7am, drink coffee in the yard, and get morning sunshine. Then my husband and I eat breakfast and do a bit of cleaning or some chores in the garden.