Frida Kahlo was more than just meets the brows. The Mexican artist had a life full of pain, romance and above all, powerful artistic talent. But here are a few things you might not have known… She was born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón: she only changed her name to Frieda in 1935, which comes…
Even among the most discreet out there, one of the perks of knowing about art is knowing you know about art. This often involves cluing others into your vast stores of knowledge — humourously by dropping the casual “if it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it” pun and sending classical art snaps, and like a bludgeon by…
BY ANNA RADLBECK / Is it fear? We gather experiences which let us doubt the rhythm and unnatural order of things. Should we submit or follow our inner rebellion? Do you want to be part of the system? There are masters and slaves, hunters and hunted, adherents and individualists. It is a cruel world full of…
Summer’s tapping out for another turn around the sun, and Autumn is poised to have its way with us. Maybe the weeks directly leading up to Winter’s freezing over of city pavements and inner hopes aren’t your thing, but I happen to fancy the mutable, wistful moments of Fall. There’s a sort of fuzzily charged magic…
Trinity Tristan’s studio is just off the bustling Ridley Road market, when I arrive she leads me up to a large shared studio space busy with activity. The space is filled with artists working in a range of media, from sculptural pieces to large drawings. As I approach Trinity’s section of the space I hear…
The places where culture converges are some of the loveliest around, for all the senses. So join me below as I dash through a pared down list of remarkable paintings and drawings that acted as muses for classical composers and creatives of a more melodious sort than their paint-flinging brethren. You’ll see, and hear, that…
A series of sombre paintings from the later eighties by Corneliu Baba (Romanian, 1906-1997) recently caught my eye, depicting insane rulers of the ragged, already-gone King Lear sort. Perhaps the natural attraction I felt sprang from my lifelong affinity for things “Ye Olde Englishe-y” — medieval bestiaries, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Yorks, Plantagenets…
Gino Rubert, a painter born and raised in Mexico, now splits his time between Barcelona and Berlin. His process results in a striking combination between painting and photography. While painted elements showcase a vast array of vivid colours, photorealistic details in black and white emerge to to create a perfect, hypnotic juxtaposition. Usually focusing the…
A crown is never just a crown. Its bearer, its layered symbolism and its various interpretations, all these things are an inherent part of such a regal item. Historically, crowns have played a major role in society. They are symbols of unchecked power, the expected headdresses of individuals that wield such power. Crowns speak of…
Poor Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Not literally— the storied French painter and lithographer of the nineteenth century was born a dot on a line of formidable counts stretching back, uninterrupted, to Charlemagne. But a silver spoon hardly ever glanced his fleshy lips; his origins in ancestral chateaux were the opening of a condemned circle which…