About two-thirds of the way through her engaging new book, Emma Lewis describes the subtle yet significant distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘looking’.
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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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Have you heard of champing? Neither had I. Turns out it’s camping in a field beside a deserted church.
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It’s strange for an artist to be defined by a single artwork. It is stranger still if that artist works across a range of media, and is also an author, a teacher, a feminist and an activist.
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There is a myth, writes Alice Hattrick in their new book, Ill Feelings, that to be ill is to hide, “that to be inexplicably ill and dependent on the care and support of others is a choice, a way of getting out of what you don’t want to do, a choice that clever, deceitful young women make for themselves”.
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‘The point is to imagine,’ murmurs Paula, the walleyed protagonist of Maylis de Kerangal’s engaging new novel, Painting Time. She’s talking to Kate, with whom she’s studying the art of trompe-l’œil at the Institut de Peinture in Brussels.
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The first thing that hits me when I see Damien Hirst’s Cherry Blossoms isn’t the scale (monumental) or the palette (psychedelic) but the paint itself. It’s thick, sticky and a little bit nasty.
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‘The interesting thing,’ says Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand, ‘is that when you use a Lalanne desk, bar or chair, you have to change the way you use a desk, bar or chair.’
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I’ve never been to Barcelona, but Rupert Thomson makes it feel like an old friend. The hot, airless nights and the car engines, ‘exhaust fumes mingled with frangipani’ and beneath the smell of jasmine ‘the stale, slightly medieval smell of drains’.
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Despite insisting that her magnified flower paintings (c.1924–50s) were not expressions of female sexuality, Georgia O’Keeffe endured Freudian readings of her work by male critics throughout her career.
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When Heather Phillipson was invited to fill Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries, the artist behind the spoiled swirl of whipped cream on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth felt simultaneously daunted and excited.
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As museums in England reopen their doors to the public this month, it is fitting that the Hepworth Wakefield—which celebrates its tenth anniversary on 21 May—is doing so with a major exhibition of Barbara Hepworth, an artist for whom physical encounters with art were so vital.
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There's something hopeful about Rana Begum's art. The way painting, sculpture and installation shift and morph. The soft pastel colours and the subtle gleam of light.
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After falling in love with Italy as a young woman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri broke with English and began writing in Italian. Her new novel — a slim and bewitching tale of a woman at her midpoint — she wrote first in Italian and has since translated.
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Auctioneer Stéphane Aubert rolls up on his Vespa at the entrance to an enormous storage space in the industrial no-man’s-land northwest of Paris. He’s sharply dressed in a shirt and tie, his navy pinstripe suit is crease-free and his black brogues are polished to a shine. He slips off his helmet and smiles.
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Jessie Greengrass’s absorbing debut novel, Sight, began with an unnamed narrator telling us she was pregnant and ended with her giving birth. In her even more absorbing second novel, The High House, we find ourselves once again waiting for waters to break, although in this case it is the waves that rise and roil.
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Naomi Ishiguro began writing Common Ground in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The title refers to both Goshawk Common in Newford, Surrey, where 13-year-old Stanley Gower meets 16-year-old Charlie Wells, and the threads that bind the boys despite their differences.
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It takes confidence to write about something as undramatic as the postal service – a confidence that struts across the page in Vigdis Hjorth’s most recent novel to appear in English.
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In the autumn of 1977, the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks and his partner, fellow artist Brian Buczak, gave the painter Alice Neel a lift back into New York City from Rutgers University in New Jersey.
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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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