What’s a painter like Basil Beattie to do, when it becomes apparent to all except the wilfully blind, somewhere around the beginning of the 1980s, that the sort of Modernist abstraction that his generation of British artists had...
There was a time, back in the early 1980s, when you couldn’t walk for more than a couple of yards through the Fine Art department of a British art school without tripping over a John Walker painting. Not that Walker himself would have...
Speaking of the Red Army’s vast resources of manpower at the height of the Second World War, that well-known patron of the arts, Joseph Stalin, declared that ‘Quantity has a quality all its own’; and on the evidence of his current...
‘Alan Gouk at 80’, at the Hampstead School of Art, is a modest show with immodest ambitions. Five paintings- four of them mural-sized- hang in the ground floor exhibition space, with a batch of works on paper in a room beyond. These...
It’s the early 1970s in America. You’re contemplating launching yourself as a painter on the New York art scene. And for you, life is far from easy; there’s never been a less propitious time for practising your chosen art form. Caught...
Instantloveland was greatly saddened to learn of the death of painter John McLean on 12th June. Fittingly, Tate Britain have chosen to commemorate him with a simple plaque and a single canvas, ‘Opening’ of 1987. It’s...
Wallace Stevens, the poet laureate of Abstract Expressionism, had this to say about the creative act: ‘It must be abstract. It must change. It must give pleasure.’ Full marks for Frank Bowling, then, by that reckoning: the half-dozen...
As far as Instantloveland is concerned, if you’re going to host a show of prints by Cy Twombly, an artist famously obsessed with classical antiquity, then ideally you’ll have the same handle as a hero of the Trojan War; and in this...
Could it be that abstraction has finally fallen in step with the zeitgeist? No longer a martyr laid to rest in the boneyard of rarefied aesthetic ideals, it has risen again as both observer and critic of the rise of the ‘mega city’ and...
