‘Very full blown and frightening’ were the words Paul Nash used to describe the painting above, one of the last he completed and among his most powerful. But why did he say that? What was it about this work that alarmed him?

The painting is an imaginative composition based on a view over the Thames Valley from Boars Hill. Nash often travelled the short distance from his wartime home in Oxford to his friend Hilda Harrisson’s house, where a wide window framed this view over woodland to the distant tree-topped hills known as the Wittenham Clumps…

In December 1939, shortly before his appointment as an official war artist, Eric Ravilious travelled to the village of Uffington, just north of the Berkshire Downs. Walking up to the iron age hill fort on the ridge with his drawing board in a canvas satchel, he found a vantage spot looking across the steep valley known as The Manger to the White Horse. Completed back home in Essex, the resulting watercolour gives a vivid sense of place and atmosphere. Rain falls from a pale grey sky over chalky grassland that is rough and tufty in the foreground but becomes, at a distance, smooth and sinuous, almost muscular.

The year 1877 saw some notable events in London – the first Test cricket match between England and Australia, the first Wimbledon tennis championship, the first human cannonball act – but in the London art world the exciting news was the opening of the new Grosvenor Gallery by artist and collector Sir Lindsey Coutts. The role and impact of this venture was described for the Royal Cornwall Gazette by ‘a Cornishman’ who visited in June.

I'm so proud of my new exhibition at the RWA in Bristol!

Dance Out is an exhibition of paintings, drawings and film that celebrates dance as an everyday human activity, both solitary and social. The RWA itself will shape-shift during the exhibition, with the main daylit galleries hosting a series of dance and dance-related events.

Until the other day I don't think I'd ever walked the length of Savile Row, a street that was once the byword for elegant English tailoring but which is now being infiltrated by art galleries - Hauser and Wirth at one end and at the other a space recently opened by Pilar Corrias. This feels like a former shop, with black and white tiles in the front and an arch at the back leading to a tiny room where - who knows? - maybe an old chap used to sit altering trousers for the gentry.

On a walk round the autumn sales exhibition at Sothebys last year there were a few works that really jumped out: a smallish Francis Bacon that dominated a room containing a much larger Rodin; an Anselm Kiefer so vast you would need an aircraft hangar to keep it in; and downstairs a painting by Caroline Walker (above) from the series devoted to her mother Janet. Someone bought the painting in the auction and I hope they were as excited as I would be if I were the successful bidder.

I recently went along to the private view of an exhibition by an artist I'd never heard of, at a gallery I'd never visited before, braving the south London rain to do so and - thanks to a delayed train - having to run to get there before the end. I don't run often, but something about the image of the work sent out in the Kristin Hjellegjerde gallery newsletter forced me to make the effort. 

Four Stars for Tirzah Garwood!

The prolonged lack of activity on this site is due, not to laziness as you might think, but to me having been working flat out on the exhibition opening at the end of next week at Hastings Contemporary... 

SOUTINE | KOSSOFF
HASTINGS CONTEMPORARY
1 APRIL – 24 SEPT 2023

From fishermen to submariners, migrants to merchant seamen, people throughout the ages have shared the experience of being at sea. Seafaring explores the perils and pleasures of life at sea, while at the same time taking visitors on an art historical voyage from the early 19th century to the present.