Search

The author shares her reflections creating her portrait paintings. Topics discussed include the artist's exploration of the fragility of human condition by depicting aspects of childhood, the reminder that adults have an inner child in them although they pretend to be strong, and the start of the artist's career from ceramic sculpture which developed into painting. Also highlighted are the author's acrylic on canvas paintings.

This essay explores the visual cultural production of three twentieth-century Black Caribbean Central American women painters: June Beer and Judith Kain, both from the Miskitu Coast, and Iris Abrahams, from San Andrés and Providencia. Specifically, it contextualizes these artists' landscape portraiture against the historical backdrops of colonialism, territorial dispossession, and autonomous struggle in the isthmus. Understanding the political and the cultural as inextricably intertwined, this essay reads their place-based visual art as a critical form of anticolonial critique and social organizing in a region that remains marginalized in the historiography and scholarship on Latin America and the Caribbean and radical Black diasporic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines spiritualist artist Evelyn De Morgan's representation of the self in several paintings c. 1900, including never before discussed portraits. Starting with the portraits' unusual treatment of the face as deflecting psychological legibility, it argues that the 'self' that they figure aligns with that described in contemporary scientific writings, notably by experimental psychologist and psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers and physicist Oliver Lodge. Writing from perspectives sympathetic to spiritualism, Myers and Lodge described the self as immortal, composite and mutable, invisible yet physical, exceeding the confines of the material body, and related somehow to ether. This essay draws on the entangled fin‐de‐siècle histories of science and spiritualism (and activates some of Gilles Deleuze's later theories) to argue that De Morgan summoned this self into a form at least contingently visible by exploiting the representational potential of the mutable, imponderable ether and its widely assumed properties: energic, (hyper‐)spatial, temporal, and spiritual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late Ming, illustrated materia medica works became increasingly salient among educated elites in the Jiangnan area. This article analyzes two hand-illustrated treatises, Jinshi kunchong caomu zhuang and Bencao tupu , and the cultural contexts of their production. The interplays between copying and editing and image-text relationships in the two works provide insight into how materia medica was exploited as a pictorial subject for ideas about the human-nature dynamic. I demonstrate that materia medica images represented symbolic possession of the natural world and thus served as a maker of social distinction. I also shed light on the perpetuated tradition of making images of materia medica as an intellectual practice. My examinations of materia medica images by women artists also challenge the correlations between gender and representations of flora and fauna in the historiography of Chinese paintings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay searches for the meaning of the medal commemorating Bolognese painter Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614). While doing so, it rediscovers what has been regarded as an interesting but derivative object to be a most sophisticated artwork. Fontana's medal was not just an honour: it was a cultural intervention that addressed multiple cultural debates taking place across central Italy, from the nature of emblems to women's worth. While presenting some overlooked sources related to Fontana's medal and contemporary artistic production (a couple of treatises, a guidebook, and a thank you note), the essay introduces three new exemplars of the coin. This new evidence prompts a reconsideration of the circulation of Fontana's medal and the identity of its designer, a question that has so far escaped attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For nearly sixty years, painter Dorothy Eugénie Brett (1883–1977) made use of multiple hearing prostheses she collectively referred to as her "ear machines": trumpets, auricles, carbon acoustic devices, and electric hearing aids. She relied on these machines both as technologies of assimilation and as objects of power to negotiate the often-contested boundaries between hearing and deafness. The ear machines—especially a large ear trumpet named Toby—serve as a prosthetic configuration of the "disabled gaze": an autonomous claiming of identity that required, if not depended on, the revelation of disability experience as a guard against ableism. In letters, photographs, and paintings, Brett positioned her machines to foster positive connotations of deafness to both normalize their use and to dominate social spaces to ensure that the otherwise invisibility of her disability was not ignored. Through the disabled gaze, the ear machines bring to fore the deepest convictions between Brett's private and public selves to enable her to live an autonomous life as a deaf woman and artist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1980s, Bridget Riley produced a series of paintings distinguished by their use of the same group of colours, said to have been inspired by the vividly preserved painted tombs that she encountered during a visit to Egypt in the winter of 1979–80. Though clearly related to the black‐and‐white paintings that propelled Riley to international fame in the 1960s, these new works represented a notable change in the artist's methods, combining an intuitive arrangement of colour with a simple compositional motif: the stripe. While determinedly abstract, the imaginative origins of Riley's stripe paintings are registered in many of the titles that they carry: Ka (1980); Ra (1981); Luxor (1982); Winter Palace (1981). This essay reconsiders the making, display and reception of Riley's so‐called 'Egyptian palette' within a longer history of encounter and exchange between Britain and Egypt, ranging across more than a century of military occupation and resistance, Cold War entrenchment, and neoliberal diplomacy. In doing so, it situates Riley's work between colonial and post‐colonial ways of seeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines debates surrounding artistic integrity, cultural hierarchies and the visual arts in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Lady's Mile (1866) and Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1866). It puts Braddon's rarely discussed novel in dialogue with Miss Marjoribanks to examine their shared anxieties about the conflicting demands of popular markets and artistic integrity. The Lady's Mile reveals that even the idealised male celebrity painter is not immune from the influence of the consumer society of the 1860s, although he can easily shed the family responsibilities that dominate the life of self-sacrificing design instructor Rose Lake in Miss Marjoribanks. Although these career narratives are strongly gendered, Braddon traces how concerns about moral corruption and audience influence link high art painters and popular women writers; while Oliphant asserts the value of design as a form of genuine artistic self-expression. Ultimately, both women therefore destabilise artistic hierarchies and the notion of disinterested art in their novels, thus asserting the value of their own productions and modes of working. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Irish painter Una Watters along with her works. Topics include the "Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain" painting of a woman in profile dressed in a red coat, gripping an umbrella by Watters; exhibition of her paintings at the Dublin Painters Gallery in November 1966; and her style of painting.

This article is a fictional response to paintings, sketches and notebooks left behind by the painter Lil Neilson (1938–98) in her studio, The Watchie, after her death. The writing takes as its starting point the work that Neilson made in the last ten years of her life, when she returned to the coastal village of Catterline, Aberdeenshire. The title of the article is taken from a painting Neilson made in 1993–4. An extended, recomposed and adapted version of this text was published as an artists' book, The Bitter Cup, in September 2019, commissioned by Book Works and Hospitalfield. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the artist Lys Hansen (b. 1936) and discusses her work in relation to Scottish art and its infrastructures, self-portraiture, expressionism and the positioning of artists who are women. Although Hansen has been regarded as one of the key figurative painters working in Scotland in the mid-to-late-twentieth century, this essay suggests that her gender has defined the reception of her painting practice. The research proposes that re-evaluating her career will allow a fuller interpretation of her work and its relevance to historic and current painting practices in Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bet Low's early work captured city scenes and people, before she turned her attention to landscape painting. Low then developed a uniquely figurative style, visually reducing landscape into key elements. Running concurrently with her artistic practice, Low's early experience at Glasgow Unity Theatre and involvement in artist-led groups led to her co-founding the New Charing Cross Gallery (1963–8).Although she was an independent artist actively working outside any institutional context, Low did not consider herself 'unknown'. This article therefore considers the visibility of her practice, concluding with a consideration of her critical legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the career of Glasgow painter Carole Gibbons to consider why she never achieved the same public profile as some of her contemporaries. It reflects on Glasgow's art scene from the late 1950s to mid-1980s, her peer group, influences and her position as a woman, to understand why she is not more recognized. Since 2012 her work has been brought to wider public attention by a new generation of artists, specifically through her friendship with the painter Lucy Stein. This article uses an interview with Gibbons and Stein as a basis for unravelling Gibbons' experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Scottish painter Pat Douthwaite (1934–2002) has often been dismissed as a 'troubled' artist, known for her dark and nightmarish scenes. Her unique style, however, remains unparalleled in Scottish post-war painting. Focusing on her paintings of women from the 1960s to early 1980s, this article explores Douthwaite's examination of the self and the construction of womanhood through her production of covert self-portraits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The artist, critic and curator Cordelia Oliver was an incisive and highly respected art critic in Scotland from the late 1950s to her death in 2009. Through her critical writing and curatorial practice, she offered a unique perspective on the production and reception of art from Scotland in the mid-to-late twentieth century. This paper focuses particularly on Oliver's role as an artist-critic and her efforts to ensure the visibility and critical reputation of painting by women in Scotland, including many of her peers and contemporaries such as Bet Low, Margot Sandeman and Joan Eardley, and later painters, including Carole Gibbons and Pat Douthwaite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the engraved copperplate depicting the method of catching and preserving insects for collections attributed to natural history painter Ann Lee which appeared in the 1771 revised edition of the pamphlet "Directions for Bringing Over Seeds and Plants from the East-Indies and Other Distant Countries, in a State of Vegetation," by John Ellis. Topics covered include age of Lee when she painted the plate in "Directions," and overview of the botanical and insect drawings of Lee.

This essay focuses on the work of one artist, the painter Cathy Lomax, and on the way in which various aspects of Lomax's practice – invariably informed by cinema – illuminate the theme of 'the scene of the self'. The essay draws Lomax's work into convergence with the concept of glamour; interprets her prize-winning painting Black Venus; explicates her Film Diary series; and relates her work to one particular movie, Opening Night (1977) directed by John Cassavetes, as chosen by the author – hence the tone of this penultimate section unapologetically inhabits the 'scene' of the author's own 'self' as signalled by use of the first person 'I' and 'my'. The essay then concludes by returning to a more objective and academic tone, while summarizing the ways in which Lomax's work illustrates a cinematically and theatrically informed sense of a twenty-first century self, as shared and confirmed by leading cultural commentators, philosophers and theorists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the work of contemporary Mongolian artist Jalkhaajavin Munkhtsetseg (b 1967), commonly known as Mugi. Focusing on her mixed-media series Silence, it explores her subversive approach to the female body as the site of a private exploration, previously discouraged by Mongolia's socialist regime, and discusses the ways Mugi's art responds to the questions of feminism, initially a Western concept, and its applicability to Asian women artists (Joan Kee 2007, 2009). The article argues that while Mugi's ideas were shaped by the realities of a post-socialist atmosphere of anxiety (Manduhai Buyandelger 2007, 2013) and search for identity (Christopher Kaplonski 2004), yet her questions and visual forms relate to global issues of women dealing with trauma - as also attested to by Louise Bourgeois's psychic body (Rosemary Betterton 2009) - reparation based on meaningful connections with nature, reviving of traditions and women's positioning in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]