Abstract Art

Subtitled, What can we learn from art about our sense of identity, this short article explores some of the themes of the Wellcome Collection’s (London) show Identity: 8 Rooms, and appeared in Art of England (issue 67, 2010). In today’s world, people have multiple identities, particularly with the Internet — our Facebook persona is not […]

The September issue of Frieze art magazine is all about ‘theory’ or what appears to pass for theory in the art world.  The whole issue reads like some undergraduate magazine or papers prepared by graduate students with too much time on their hands; political polemic blends with obscure language, which even core Frankfurt-school-istas would find […]

“Tu m’” by Marcel Duchamp is a good example of how this artist played with our sensibilities.  Karl Gerstner, in his Puzzle Upon Puzzle, which examines Tu m’ in exquisite #161617233 / gettyimages.com detail is an example of an analytical critique that may just miss the point. I read this book through with great interest, […]

Kodak has announed the end of production of Kodachrome film.  Those who still use film will know Kodachrome film for the quality of the colour and indeed I suspect many of us used Kodachrome as our reference film for documenting the world around us. Film tracked the industrial revolution, documenting virtually all of the past […]

Image via Wikipedia Should we see art history as linear, with the phases, fads and movements embedded in the moment, or can we continue to learn from them, revisit them over time.  Indeed, can all of art exist simultaneously? There is a bias toward linearity in art history, but it is tiring and probably unhelpful […]

Image via Wikipedia I am still trying to make sense of Malevich.  His book, commented on in an earlier posting, published in English in 1959, but dating much earlier, still feels fresh and insightful and I continue to be taken by his approach to ‘treating’ realist painters, by prescribing the medicine of Cubism.  Some artist […]

Linking my own artistic vision to my professional work presents challenges, partly in working with the abstract concepts of policy work, which pays the bills, but finding client receptivity to the representation of concepts visually. On a work visit to Toronto, I encountered a firm, Infonauts, which specialise in visual representation of data, on maps.  […]