Clik here to view.
Changing Paintings: 36 Theseus and the Minotaur
Book 8 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses resumes his account of King Minos of Crete waging war against the Greeks, and the hapless Cephalus who had inadvertently killed his wife Procris with his javelin....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading visual art: 156 Hospitality in myth
In the past, hospitality to strangers was high on the list of virtues expected of everyone, however rich or poor they might have been. To ensure that those living in the ancient world respected the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading visual art: 157 Hospitality in life
The previous article looked at paintings of three classical myths which extolled the principle of hospitality to strangers by warning people of the dire consequences of failing to respect it: Atlas was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Real Country: 4 Gleaning
Once a cereal crop had been harvested and gathered for threshing, the fields might then be scavenged for any remaining grain, a process known as gleaning. Although this has been described since Old...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Emily Carr’s paintings: First totems 1892-1911
Few of us ever get to visit the Pacific North-West, but one painter, more than anyone else, has defined its ‘look’. She’s also one of a very few prolific women artists for whom there are sufficient...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Laundresses in a landscape 1
Until well into the twentieth century, running water was what came through the roof when it rained, and didn’t come from a tap. Although only the rich could afford to wear clothes for short periods and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Laundresses in a landscape 2
In the first of these two articles celebrating the work of generations of women who washed clothes and linen outdoors, and have been featured in landscape paintings, I covered the period up to the end...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Changing Paintings: 37 The fall of Icarus
The architect and artificer Daedalus had been introduced by Ovid in his account of the death of the Minotaur, and the next myth in Metamorphoses tells of the tragic end to Daedalus’ stay on the island...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading visual art: 158 Voyeur, classical
As a visual art, painting is all about looking and seeing, and one of its more discomforting themes is that of the voyeur, the eyes that shouldn’t be there, looking at something they really shouldn’t....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading visual art: 159 Voyeur, modern
In the first article of these two considering voyeurism in paintings, I examined classical examples from myth and the popular Biblical stories of King David and Bathsheba, and Susanna and the Elders....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Real Country: 5 Threshing and processing grain
Harvested cereal needs to be separated into grain, stems of straw, and miscellaneous fragments such as husk known as chaff. Of these, the grain is the most valuable as it will be ground into flour, a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Emily Carr’s paintings: Haida 1912-1913
In 1912, when Emily Carr returned to Vancouver from Paris, she established herself there as a Fauvist when exhibiting her work from France in her studio. Equipped with what she had learned over the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Heroines 20, 21: Cydippe’s apple of love
There’s more to classical Greek and Roman myths than rape, murder and metamorphoses. Sometimes they tell touching stories of true love, like that of Acontius and Cydippe. You won’t have heard of them,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Heroines: Introduction, overview and contents
Ovid’s Heroines (Heroides in the original Latin) are among his more controversial writings. They could have been written early in his career, or quite late, and some have claimed that few of its...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Changing Paintings: 38 The Calydonian Boar Hunt
As Ovid approaches the midpoint of Book 8 of his Metamorphoses, he has just left Daedalus burying his son Icarus after their flight from Crete went tragically wrong. He then relates one of the greatest...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading visual art: 160 Birth
Despite the hopes of the taxman, there really only are two certainties in life, that everyone alive was born, and we’ll every one of us die. This week, in this series examining how to read visual art,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading visual art: 161 Death
Although birth hasn’t proved such a popular theme in paintings, there are countless depictions of death. Dominant among them in European works are those of the Crucifixion, but in this brief survey I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Real Country: 6 The mill
Despite their popularity as crops for millennia, cereals require preparation into more palatable form before they can form the mainstay of most diets, as one of the staple sources of carbohydrates, as...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Emily Carr’s paintings, 1914-1930
The 1913 solo exhibition of two hundred of Emily Carr’s paintings of totems and villages of the First Nations in the Pacific North-West flopped. Despite trying to enlist the support of the minister of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Coast of Maine: 19th century paintings
This weekend I’m visiting the coast of Maine, the small state tucked away at the north-eastern extremity of the US. Although its climate may not be ideal for plein air work, its 230 miles (400 km) of...
View Article