The Easel

2nd July 2019

Lubaina Himid’s colorful paintings explore the influence of the African diaspora

Sarah Moroz | i-d.vice | 24th June 2019

Himid has the voice of an activist. She charges that Britain’s “selective version of the past” erases black people. To make that point with her art, she has drawn on the work of satirists like William Hogarth. Himid often puts her figures in formal groupings, in the style of eighteenth century paintings. Satire, she says, helps with the “task of taking apart old ways of holding on to power.”

Renoir the sensualist, and the pleasures of paint

Murray Whyte | Boston Globe | 6th June 2019

Some call Renoir a ravishing colourist. More often, critics praise is sparing. This writer says of one work “it has little to tell, and everything to show.” Renoir’s sin – “lush, gorgeous escapism”. At a time of wrenching social change he focused on “the pleasures of color and light, flesh and form.” An excuse, of sorts, is offered up – Renoir was simply an artist for whom “subject was secondary, and painting was all”.

25th June 2019

Geoff Dyer on the poetry of motels

Geoff Dyer | The Spectator | 22nd June 2019

Beautiful writing. Old style Las Vegas motels are celebrated in a recent photography book. A straightforward review is here. The linked piece is something else. It starts as a review but untethers, becoming a reverie.” The defining architectural feature of the motel — no need to go through a public lobby to get to your room.  [But] romance shrivelled the moment you entered the room. The smell …” More images are here.

Photographing the Otherworldly and the Abject

Barry Schwabsky | The Nation | 14th June 2019

Surely photography cannot get further away from the ‘decisive moment’ than Ess’s images. They are blurry, indistinct, cheap, sourced from pinhole cameras and surveillance footage. Their allure is that they deter interpretation, thinks one critic. Or do they entice us look even harder for meaning? Says Ess, these images have the “capacity to transform the ordinary into the symbolic”.

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