I have recently returned from Paris where I visited a new exhibition about the work of Artemesia Gentileschi at Musee Jacquemart-Andre. I have been an admirer of her art for a long time and I was excited to see art that I was familiar with as well as some that I had never seen before.

If you are not familair with Artemesia Gentileschi here’s a few facts about her:

She was (1593 – c.1656) was an Italian Baroque painter. The paintings of this period were very theatrical and dramatic. As with the Renaissance artists, the Baroque artists worked for the court, the aristocracy and the church as its patrons. Artists of the period included Rubens, Caravaggio and Bernini. Women artists were uncommon and were not allowed to become members of the increasingly important and controlling art academies and so had to be taught by either their fathers or husbands. Her father, Orazio, was an artist, and realising her artistic talent taught her himself. He also employed an artist friend of his, Tassi, to teach her perspective. Tassi raped her when she was 17 and this has been pivotal to how her and her art has been interpreted. The rape trial brought her enormous notoriety, attention and speculation which both now and then often overshadows her actual painting achievements. Women artists usually painted still life and portraiture, which were considered the lower genres of art but Artemesia chose to depict the mythological and biblical themes and in the majority of her paintings a woman is the protagonist. She is unusual as she achieved international fame during her lifetime and made a living from her painting.

There are approximately 50 paintings in existence that are attributed to Artemesia and including the seminal Susanna and the Elders which is included in this exhibition.

The painting that intrigued me was Allegory of Inclination (1615-1617). I had never seen it before and it reminded me of the artworks created by the pre Raphaelite painters.

The Allegory of Inclination was one of fifteen canvases commissioned by Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger (to honour his great uncle, Michelangelo) for the ceiling in the Gallery Room in his home in Florence.

Artemesia painted (oil on canvas) a full size naked woman surrounded by white clouds, holding a compass and looking towards the north star, thought to be a reference to Galileo, who was now in her circle of associates.

However the painting as we see it today is not how Artemesia painted it because in 1684 the subsequent owner of the house considered the nudity offensive and asked another painter, Baldassare Franceschini, to paint drapery over the naked body.

In 2022 (400 years after it was created) Allegory of Inclination was taken down from the ceiling for restoration. The canvas was drooping, the colours had dulled and cracked and the varnish was yellowing. It was not until restoration began that it became apparent that it was impossible to physically remove the added drapery paint without damaging the work, so the painting had to be restored to incude the drapery.

In order to find out what the original painted by Artemsia looked like,  advanced diagnostic imaging techniques were used to create a digital replica of the original, with the drapery removed. The whole process took almost a year.

Below is a photograph of the digital replica comparing the original painting, the unrestored original painting with added drapery and the restored original painting with the drapery which is what you will see if you visit the exhibition.

And here is Allegory of Inclination restored and reframed in the Artemesia Heroine of Art exhibition.

This is the accomanying text translated into English.

Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, man of letters and great nephew of Michelangelo, is one of the most important protectors of Artemesia in Florence and his friend. She is pregnant and in a difficult economic situation when he entrusts her with this order, which concerns the decoration of a ceiling of his family palace. Allegory of Inclination, symbolizing Michelangelo’s natural propensity for art, takes the bold form of a naked woman whose features are those of Artemesia.The work is distinguished by its strong Caravesque naturalism. The compass pointing towards the polar star denotes Bounarroti’s links with science, and in particular with the astronomer Galileo. The restoration of the work in 2022-2023 revealed that originally, the figure was completely naked or dressed in a transparent veil, before being covered with a modesty brocade by the artist Baldassare Francheschini at the request of the heir of the sponsor.

Anya Gallaccio is an artist who works with organic materials such as flowers, fruit, sugar and ice to create (largely) impermanent artworks that change over time.

Preserve Beauty (1991) is one of my favourite pieces of her work. Several hundred red gerbera flowers are pressed and held behind a sheet of glass and left to gradually decompose.

Beauty is the name of this particular red gerbera that Gallaccio uses. Gerberas are a mass produced standardised commercial product and are the result of human intervention. Here they have been grown and then cut in their prime, at their most beautiful, and left to die.

This gradual process is seen over a period of weeks and questions our perception of beauty.

Preserve Beauty is reminiscent of the Dutch vanitas paintings of the 16^th and 17th centuries. Vanitas paintings which show objects that are symbolic of the brevity and transience of life and of the inevitability of death. They are seen as a meditation on decay, change and mortality.

Find out more about Anya Gallaccio

I was commissioned to make an artwork for Surreal Solihull, a public art project with Solihull Council in collaboration with public art consultant/curator Ruth Millington.

This is a bit about where I got my inspiration from as well as details of the brief and the exhibition.

The Brief

The artist’s brief was create new work in response to the theme of ‘Surreal’; to celebrate Solihull’s history of Surrealism, a 20th century cultural movement that challenged reality by exploring the unconscious mind and dreams.

Solihull was once home to one of Surrealism’s leading members, Emmy Bridgwater (1906 – 1999). During her successful career, she drew, painted and collaged strange, dreamlike landscapes of her mind. Birds, butterflies, mythological women, and wide eyes populate her symbolic pictures in which irrational images are juxtaposed. This same imagery can be found in her poetry, which she published in Surrealist magazines during her lifetime. She was also a proponent of automatic drawing.

Surrealism

Surrealism was a cultural and intellectual movement that flourished across Europe in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Founded in 1924 by the poet André Breton who defined Surrealism as:

“pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought.”

Surrealism reacted against the Enlightenment—the influential 18th-century intellectual movement that championed reason and individualism. Instead, Surrealism’s goal was to liberate thought, language, and human experience from the oppressive boundaries of rationalism and for artist, writers, poets and thinkers to explore the irrational, unconscious mind.

Having studied the psychoanalytical writings of Sigmund Freud, Breton was particularly interested in the idea that the unconscious mind—which produced dreams—was the source of artistic creativity; this became a key theme of many Surrealist artworks, writings and performances.

Contemporary artists continue to take inspiration from this radical art movement.

Read more about Surrealism.

 Emmy Bridgwater (1906-1999)

On 11 June 1936, the International Surrealist Exhibition opened in London. Visitors were amazed as Salvador Dalí delivered a lecture while wearing a full deep-sea diving suit. None was more impacted by this dramatic arrival of Surrealism in Britain than a 30-year-old artist and poet: Emma ‘Emmy’ Bridgwater who invoked the Surrealist principle of juxtaposing unusual objects to reveal uncanny narratives; in her paintings and ink drawings viewers are invited into interior worlds, defined by a symbolic language of birds, eggs and organic forms.

She experimented with automatic ink drawing as a means of accessing and expressing her subconscious. Impressed, Breton wrote in the 1940s: “Bridgwater brought a new purity of outlook to British Surrealism, returning to the early days of the movement, to its ‘automatic’ beginnings in France”. He invented her to Paris – to sign a Surrealist manifesto and exhibit her works in a major gallery show.

Read more about Emmy Bridgwater.

 My inspiration for When You Come This Way 2025. (Acrylic paint on board).

My artwork was inspired by Solihull’s coat of arms, blending symbols that represent both the urban and the rural, while connecting to Bridgwater’s love of birds. The ruff represents Shakespeare’s connection to the area and his plays that were set in rural locations but performed on urban stages: the goldfinch inhabits both gardens and woodlands : the hunting dog is now equally at home as a pet.

The Exhibition

 The outdoor exhibition Surreal Solihull will be on display in Solihull town centre until May 31^st 2025 and can be accessed at any time.

Find out about all 30 commissioned artists.

The Emmy Bridgwater Estate has endorsed the project and exhibition

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) by Cornelia Parker

Another artist who I find inspirational is Cornelia Parker. Much of her work involves destruction followed by resurrection and reconfiguration.

A theme in what inspires me seems to be emerging!

I love all of her work but Cold Dark Matter was the first piece of hers that I ever saw and I was transfixed by it when I saw it in Tate Modern, London.

To make the work Parker collaborated with the army to blow up a shed and it’s contents. The remnants were suspended from ceiling as if in mid explosion and were lit by a single light bulb which cast shadows on the gallery’s walls. I remember the shadows giving the impression that the work was expanding ever outwards and indeed it has been likened to the big bang – hence the title.

But like the previous artwork I wrote about (Blow Up by Ori Gersht) it is re configured into something very quiet and contemplative, the antithesis of the violence it took to create the piece.

The use of everyday objects is something everyone can relate to, whether in a practical or sentimental way. To see them like this is a reminder of the fragility of our existence. Or at least that’s how it made me feel.

Read the full story about Cold Dark Matter here.

The first in a series of blog posts about artworks, artists or anything else that has inspired me

Blow Up (2007- 8) by Ori Gersht

I saw this work in an exhibition in London called Vanitas: The Transience of Earthly Pleasures (2010). A group show exploring the vanitas genre concerning the transience of life and the futlity of earthly desires, often represented with symbols such as candles, insects, mirrors and flowers. Subject matter I often use.

The exhibition was incredible but the piece of work that most captivated me was Blow Up (2007-8) by Ori Gersht – a series of large photographs capturing the process of the detonation of a flower arrangement.

Blow Up (above) was inspired by the still life floral oil painting called The Rosy Wealth of June (1886) (below)  by the French painter Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904).

Gersht froze his re creation of this flower arrangement in liquid nitrogen and concealed small explosive charges within it. He then detonated them and used several cameras to capture the instantaneous moment of explosion using very fast camera speeds of seven and a half thousandths of a second.

The speed is too fast for the brain to process but technology can capture it and show us its reality.

It is extremely beautiful and very violent. I have to admit that I found it mesmerizingly beautiful for a long time before I considered the destruction and violence. But even then I find the destruction beautiful, or rather, the photographs of the destruction. So maybe the photograph is standing between me (the viewer) and the reality of what is happening (the explosion), and so the destruction becomes more of an abstract concept?

It definitely makes me think of the ephemeral and vulnerable condition of nature and humankinds hand in ruining it, which is what much of my artwork is concerned with.

To read more about Ori Gersht visit his website

Still Life with Flowers

Still life has been a constant subject throughout the history of art and came to the fore in the seventeenth century. However, it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the French called it nature morte (dead nature) emphasizing the layered symbolism of this genre with its reminders of the transience of life and the inevitability of death.

Flowers are a common feature of still life art and I often use wild flowers in my artwork.

In my latest series called Shifting Shadows I have used the shadow as an additional symbol. The shadow in art has many meanings including the fleeting nature of existence, isolation and a distorted copy of reality.

Shifting shadows plays with these ideas questioning which is the reality and which is the shadow?

flowers and shadows