Ann Coxon’s grandmother was always knitting. At home in rural Derbyshire, where she raised not only her own children but also evacuees taken in by the family during the Second World War, she was forever making and mending.
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Laura Knight was still in her teens when she first flouted convention. Banned from drawing nudes at art school because she was a woman, she hired a private model to pose for her at home.
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A woman with dark hair and matching wing-like eyebrows lounges on a bed amid clashing fabrics. She’s casually propped up against a squashy pillow and her ankles are crossed.
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“It felt like the right thing for me to do,” says Sungi Mlengeya, when I ask what made her want to paint the women around her. “I’m most inspired by my fellow women and I’m one of them.”
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When Eileen Cooper was a child, her mother used to sit and draw with her in biro on a notepad. “Not that she was ever able to pursue a career in art and I don’t know if she ever had an interest really,” says Eileen, “but I obviously did.”
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When Prudence Flint started to paint women in everyday settings, her work was promptly described as “domestic”. “It’s not a sexy title, is it?” she asks. “It felt confusing because if I put a woman outside she was subject to another limit and scrutiny. So I started to think about dreams and giving myself space in that way.”
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It’s hard to keep track of the ways in which Picasso’s 80-year career has been examined (and re-examined), but few curators attempt to cover his entire oeuvre. Picasso and Paper does so through the lens of a medium he liked to manipulate.
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Louisa May Alcott’s novel has been read obsessively, and the story has also been obsessively retold. What is it about these little women that we seem compelled to revisit them, generation after generation?
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Dóra Maurer’s most recent paintings are nothing if not playful. In the fifth and final room of her first UK retrospective, colours are caught mid-flight.
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It’s easy to identify Elizabeth Macneal’s house in east London: the windowsill is lined with succulents sprouting from an assortment of striped and spotted pots. She started with one evening class a week. “I produced many deformed and far from watertight pots,” she tells me, “and then I gradually got better.”
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The Second Shelf may be small but it has a mighty ambition: to rediscover works by and about women, to generate excitement around rare books and to foster gender equality in the literary canon.
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“The thing that makes me want to paint is paint,” says Flora Yukhnovich, who, when we meet ahead of her first solo show at Parafin gallery, is dressed in clothes appropriately splattered from top to toe.
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