A fellow student, Oliver Pope, and I attended the Frieze Art Fair in Regents Park together. It featured over 150 international contemporary art galleries and indeed, I have never been to such a large display of contemporary international art in quite the same way. (more…)
There’s something I hate about the art world.
Was it the valid yet repetitive nature of this morning’s endless talks about “context” and “questioning assumptions”? Maybe I was just on my feet too long at this afternoon’s artist talk at the Craft Council. (One of our professors, Simone ten Hompel, is the proud and deserved recipient of the £30,000 Jerwood Applied Arts Prize for 2005.) Or maybe my unplaced irritation is simply a result of my late diner, which was delayed so that I could catch one more free film playing under the drizzle of London’s orange night sky in Trafalgar Square during the opening of the London Film Festival. I packed my gloves for this evening’s showing.
Another event that Oliver and I attended together was the Samuel Palmer exhibition at the British Museum. Allegorical and sublime meditative idyllic scenes made up the majority of the Romantic’s work. Oliver, Palmer and I all share inspiration from Blake, Milton and Duer with Palmer taking up a more primitive approach than either of us. This inspiration takes root in strong outlines and rich decorative patterns from medieval and early renaissance art. Palmer mixes Christian themes with the picturesque and the pastoral. Oliver, with his intricate knowledge of Romantic painting, made the perfect companion for this exhibition. I was surprised to find that Palmer is an inspiration to Lucien Freud, but I’m not sure why.