On Easter Sunday, my boyfriend and I decided to brave the atrocious weather and go to Tate Modern to see the newly opened Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs exhibition. On this particularly cold, grey, and gloomy Sunday afternoon, we looked forward to seeing the late works of an artist known as the “wild beast” of colour. I’ve seen Matisse’s paintings at…

During that winter we all told our most colourful stories. Max was especially happy at this, spooking everyone with his hexes: coincidences, omens, funny, freakish happenings, all cleaving a rather sinister zigzag behind him like the path of a tornado, dogging his step from one opening to another. Curious tricks played themselves out around his pictures, and brought him up each time,…

I recently bought myself a new sketchbook. I normally go for something very plain from Cass Art or Muji but this time, wanting a notebook with an elastic, I purchased an A6 one with creamy pages and a suede cover which, despite its low price, looks like a relative of the famous Moleskin. As I took it out of the…

I have been meaning to write about time and ageing for a while now. What prompted me to do so is the autobiography of Dorothea Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World (2001), which I am currently reading. I discovered Tanning a few weeks ago, when I was writing a blog post on “artwives” and instantly became fascinated with…

  In February, inspired by Steve Pavlina’s blog post, I took a 30-day break from Facebook, which I have already mentioned briefly in one of my recent blog posts on solitude and routine. I was keen to share this positive experience and my reflections on the impact of Facebook on an artist’s life, and now, after a few weeks of…

I was very thrilled when a few weeks ago I saw the announcement of the Ruin Lust exhibition at Tate Britain for I do have a penchant for images of decay and destruction. The exhibition, which includes over 100 works by both past and present artists, was promising a journey through “mournful, thrilling, comic and perverse uses of ruins in art from…

On the last day of December 2013, I wrote a post called The Art of Tidying Up, in which I briefly touched on the subject of regularity and order in an artist’s life. Since then, I have been giving a lot of thought to ways of improving not just the efficiency of work but also one’s emotional well-being. I often…

A month after the first Show & Tell, the time has come for the second part. February was all about painting and parading with oil-stained hands and dirty fingernails concealed underneath black varnish. The time went quickly, as it always does when one gets immersed in such intense work as painting. Today I would like to share elements of that…

Max Ernst, the author of a collage graphic novel, Une Semaine de Bonté (1934), once said: “Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them.” Last Sunday, I had the pleasure of seeing an exhibition devoted to the work of Hannah Höch, a German…

As I’ve been working on the new paintings for last few weeks, I have been reminded of what it is like to be a stereotypical artist – the one whose mood swings, bursts of anger and despair are barely sufferable for anyone in the vicinity. Somehow painting is a much more intense type of work for me than writing, and…

One day you see a strange little girl look at you One day you see a strange little girl feeling blue She’d run to the town one day Leaving home and the country fair Just beware when you’re there, strange little girl She didn’t know how to live in a town that was rough It didn’t take long before she…

Last weekend, I registered for the BP Portrait Award, which is an annual portraiture competition held at the National Portrait Gallery in London. It was started in 1979 and was initially sponsored by John Player & Sons, a tobacco company, but British Petroleum took over sponsorship of the competition in 1989 – hence the name. The exhibition opens in June…