Neja's Art Walks

05/09/2022

A Walk on the Tate Side 19th Nov at 11am - Red Trouser Day (RTD)

Join us on November 19, 2022, from 11 am.

Red Trouser Day takes…. a walk on the Tate side ……in the company of Art Historian Julija Svetlova.

What to expect: Tate Britain was established in 1897 and is the home of British art from 1500 to the present day. We will be looking at a wide range of paintings, sculpture and photographs by J.E. Millais, D. Hockney, J. M. W. Turner, John Constable and Francis Bacon. We will explore stories of women artists who have resisted traditional expectations of what women can and should do, from Mary Beale, who in the 17th Century was arguably Britain’s first professional female artist, to Barbara Hepworth and Rachel Whiteread in subsequent centuries.

Julija will be happy to give you an insight into Tate's acquisition and exhibition policies, too. Hopefully, this Experience will show you how to interpret and respond to a broad variety of artwork and artists’ philosophies and enrich your appreciation for arts in general. Every Art Walk is unique and is tailored to the interests and needs of its attendees.

Join our unique art tour in the capable hands of art historian Julija Svetlova, a freelance researcher and a founder of www.nejasartwalks.com, a provider of art and history related experiences in London (IG ). She has previously worked as a Collection Research Assistant at the Tate and...

31/07/2022

To book our National Gallery: New Look at Old Art walk, please DM or visit our website

https://www.nejasartwalks.com/bookings-checkout/national-gallery-new-look-at-old-art?referral=service_list_widget

See the National Gallery in London with an Art Historian

£50 per person
2 hours
10 people maximum

At the National Gallery, we will travel through the history of European art, focusing on the paintings of the Dutch Golden Age (Seventeenth-century) and Impressionists in particular. Rembrandt, Vermeer, Judith Leyster and Rachel Ruysch and their Flemish counterparts, Rubens and Van Dyck, are just a few artists we will be looking at. We will then spend some time looking at an excellent selection of work by Cezanne, Monet, Renoir, Picasso and others we can describe as the first truly modern artists, all of whom sought inspiration in the Northern art of the past.

From Impressionism to Abstraction, the art of the Dutch Golden Age was highly influential. Hopefully, after these 2 hours spent together, you will leave with a deeper understanding of what the art of Old Masters was all about, and why it was so important for the development of the modern art that followed.

All levels are welcome, no previous knowledge of art is required.

28/07/2022

Our Mayfair Art Walk: See Mayfair with an Art Historian will take place on August, 19, 1-3 pm.

£80 per person 2-3 hours 8 people maximum Today, London is regarded as a crucial centre for worldwide art and the art galleries and art dealers in Mayfair are some of the best in the city. With a variety of art-exhibitions every year showcasing paintings spanning the16th to 20th Centuries, as well as numerous sculptures and rare items for global art collectors who visit Mayfair galleries in search of inspiration.

But you do not have to be a collector or indeed know anything about art in order to enjoy the rich offerings of this historic culturally significant district, internationally renowned as a vibrant hub of creativity and craftsmanship, where the worlds of art, fashion and luxury converge. We will visit a small but carefully selected number of the privately-owned art galleries and auction houses and share the stories of Mayfair's present and past.

No prior knowledge of art is needed, all levels and ages are welcome.

DM to book or visit our website:
https://www.nejasartwalks.com/bookings-checkout/mayfair-art-walk?referral=service_list_widget

27/07/2022

The paintings by Nengi Omuku mostly informed by a string of real-life crises in Lagos, making the exhibition a delicate cartography of collective strife and remembrance. Omuku explained how these injustices came to take such a pre-eminent space in her work. “It got to me. It got to me and to the point where I couldn’t ignore it, and I had to start painting about it.”

To those unfamiliar with Nigeria, the recent unrest may come as a surprise. However, it is happening on the back of recurring social and economic conflicts that lay a flammable foundation awaiting a spark to ignite. While revisiting the poignant moments that led to the current conflict, the artist put the emphasis, not on those in power, they are the ghost figures in “The Sit Down”, but on those who drew the short end of the social stick. In sorrow, in grief, in protest, they gathered, and their bodies merged to form one collective unit.

Omuku’s views are informed by her highly emotive perspective on the role of the artist. “I think for me, the artist’s primary position should always be empathy. I think if you approach the world through that lens, the lens of empathy, you see things clearer, you speak about things in a more honest way […] Some of these paintings are my ways of mourning the people that have lost or protesting with the people that have had the injustice or sitting with the people that are asking for answers. So everything is from a place of empathy.”

In her work, instead of canvas the artist uses the vintage Nigerian fabric, Sanyan, also known as A*o Oke. Omuku discovered the material in 2019, soon after settling in Lagos, when she asked friends to bring her Nigerian textiles. It was part of an effort to re-immerse herself into the local culture through the fabric after spending years abroad.

DM to book one of our London's Art Walks or have a look at our website, link in Bio.

12/07/2022

Graham Sutherland's portrait of Winston Churchill is probably one of the most famous 'lost' works of art in British history, so it's little wonder it made an appearance in Netflix royal drama The Crown.

A portrait of Churchill was commissioned by the members of the House of Lords and the House of Commons to celebrate the Prime Minister’s 80th birthday.

He spent months working from the preliminary materials to create the final work on a large square canvas at his studio.
Sutherland didn’t want to give the PM any sneak peeks, as he wanted to capture the real Churchill as he was, not merely in the way he wished to be portrayed.

Churchill and his wife Lady Clementine Churchill are said to have seen the portrait before its official presentation, but it was formally unveiled by the prime minister at Westminster Hall on 30th November 1954. Churchill was not best pleased with the piece of art, he described it – with more than a hint of condescension – "a remarkable example of modern art".

The portrait should have hung in the House of Parliament after Churchill’s death, but when he finally accepted it it was taken to Chartwell. It was never displayed there and never seen again. The Crown suggests that Churchill’s wife, Clementine, had it burned in the back garden. However, a biography of the PM’s wife says a long-forgotten recording of the couple’s Private Secretary, Grace Hamblin, reveals the true fate of the portrait.

"It had been hidden in a sort of cellar at Chartwell. Grace thought about what to do. It was very, very heavy, so she got her big burly brother over to Chartwell in the dead of night, and they carried it out of Chartwell into her brother's van. I think her brother was a landscape gardener or something like that. They put it in the back of his van and drove to his house several miles away, and then scurried round the side of his house into the back garden, built a huge bonfire and put it on so that no-one could see it from the street. The next day, she told Clementine what she'd done and Clementine said: 'We'll never tell anyone about this because after I go I don't want anyone blaming you. But believe me, you did exactly as I would have wanted.”

06/07/2022

Jules de Balincourt (b.1970) is a French-born American contemporary artist, based in Brooklyn, New York. He is best known for his abstract, atmospheric paintings, with saturated colors, blurring the line between fantasy and reality.

04/07/2022

John Piper (1903–1992) was an English painter, printmaker and designer of stained-glass windows and both opera and theatre sets. His work often focused on the British landscape, especially churches and monuments, and included tapestry designs, book jackets, screen-prints, photography, fabrics and ceramics.

He turned from abstraction early in his career, concentrating on a more naturalistic but distinctive approach, but often worked in several different styles throughout his career.

Piper was an official war artist in World War II and his wartime depictions of bomb-damaged churches and landmarks, most notably those of Coventry Cathedral, made Piper a household name.

27/06/2022

Cydne Jasmin Coleby is a digital and mixed media collage artist (b.1993) based in Nassau, Bahamas.
She brings together patterns inspired by her tropical surroundings, photographs of family, and imagery from pop culture to construct images that better reflect the complexity of being.

Some of Coleby's artwork examines and highlights the ongoing exploitation of black women through the unseen labour they perform around the world. As with much of her personal art practice, she uses mixed media collage to investigate the transformative effects of trauma through a highly personal lens.

24/06/2022

Eight Sentenced in Banksy Theft, Archaeologist Yves Coppens Dies at 87, and More: Morning Links for June 24, 2022

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/banksy-bataclan-yves-coppens-morning-links-1234632691/

Here’s what we’re reading this morning.

13/06/2022

https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/italian-senator-asks-for-return-of-alleged-stolen-art-on-display-at-cleveland-museum-of-art

06/06/2022

Lubaina Himid | Tate

Have you seen it yet?

Now booking Tate Modern Exhibition Lubaina Himid Until 2 October 2022 Free entry for Members Book tickets Lubaina Himid Le Rodeur: The Exchange 2016 © Lubaina Himid Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London. Accessibility Exhibition guides Related Events We recommend Shop A theatrical e...

27/05/2022

BBC News Channel - Our World, Cambodia: Returning the Gods

For decades, temples across Cambodia were looted and their treasures stolen, smuggled and sold abroad. But now the Cambodian government wants them back.

For decades, temples across Cambodia were looted and their treasures stolen and sold.

25/05/2022

The biggest accomplishment of Hilary Pecis’s canvases is their ability to reclaim the charm of these everyday objects in a way that will make you feel seen. “The things we surround ourselves with are signifiers of who we are and who we want to be,” she says.

Born in the Bay Area to two civil servants, Pecis went to art school at the California College of the Arts in Berkeley. “She’s kind of like our David Hockney,” he curator jokes. "With an influencer’s eye for framing and a fauvist’s love of color, Pecis memorializes the beauty in the banal—a yawning bouquet of flowers in a mason jar, a cup of coffee atop a freshly completed crossword puzzle. Many artists make work about quotidian pleasures, but few revel in them like she does."

Recently, her painting fetched a stugerring $1.2 mil at an auction (her artworks went for $6.000-60.000 just a couple of years ago).

20/05/2022

Jules de Balincourt, Sarah in the Studio, 2021.

Jules de Balincourt’s radiant paintings are created via an intuitive approach to image-making, where the world we inhabit is filtered through the artist’s own psychological landscape and where references to our surrounding cultural, political and ecological reality are never less than equalled by free association and painterly invention. The relationship between individuals and their environments is an enduring theme in de Balincourt’s art. The painting on view is drawn from a new body of work and depicts a close friend of the artist.

DM to book one of our Art Walks or visit our website (link in Bio).

18/05/2022

One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Milton Avery (1885–1965) is celebrated for his luminous paintings of landscapes, figures and still lifes, which balance distillation of form with free, vigorous brushwork and lyrical colour.

Girl in Red Sweater, 1929, is an early portrait of his wife, Sally Michel Avery. Avery’s devotion to his wife is evident in paintings throughout his career. Paintings of Sally from the late 1920s and early 1930s detail Avery’s evolution away from traditional portraiture towards compositions in which the figure is treated in terms of colour and shape alone.

DM to book one of our Art Walks or visit our website (link in Bio).

16/05/2022

Chantal Joffe brings a combination of insight and integrity, as well as psychological and emotional force, to the genre of figurative art. Defined by its clarity, honesty and empathetic warmth her work, as seen in this recent painting of the writer and critic Hettie Judah, is attuned to our awareness as both observers and observed beings, apparently simple yet always questioning, complex and emotionally rich.

DM to book one of our Art Walks or visit our website (link in Bio).

06/05/2022

Born in Brussels in 1961, Stéphane Mandelbaum was a Belgian painter killed in 1986 by his accomplices after the theft of a Modigliani painting. Disfigured by acid, half-hidden in a waste land, his body will be found near Namur.

The young artist, an exceptionally gifted draughtsman but also a charismatic yet disconcerting character, left a body of work where defined by ultimately violent scenes: portraits of N***s and artists who died young, p**n scenes, shocking graffiti. Pasolini, Bacon, Rimbaud, Pierre Goldman: violent lives that seem to have prefigured the tragic death of the painter.

His exhibition is currently on at the MUSEUMMMK für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt.

04/05/2022

Celia Paul’s art is founded on deep connections – familial, creative, looping back and forth across time – and is quiet, contemplative and ultimately moving in its profound attention to detail and deeply-felt spirituality. A cornerstone of her work, Paul’s self-portraits open up a painterly and conceptual dialogue between the dual role of subject and artist – caught between self-possession and self-scrutiny – as well as offering an extended consideration on the passage of time and of the essential dualities of the medium – its ability to capture qualities of form, light and atmosphere, and its material presence.

DM to book one of our Art Walks or visit our website (link in Bio).

03/05/2022

5 Things to Know about Walter Sickert

5 Things to Know about Walter Sickert

Open now at Tate Britain

28/04/2022

Renowned for her paintings of friends, family, acquaintances, fellow artists and critics, Alice Neel (1900–1984) was among the most important American artists of her time.This work depicts the New York-based filmmaker and pioneer of early video art Michel Auder (born in France in 1945), who became a friend of Alice Neel’s in the mid-1970s when the artist was living on the Upper West Side.

Speaking about their meeting to Art in America in 2011, Auder recalls, ‘I met her when she was 75 years old, just socially. She was sitting in a chair at a party, and going “Oh, you have such a long nose! Look at it, it’s amazing! And that chin, like a Roman emperor!” She would do that to everyone…’

26/04/2022

Doron Langberg is an Israeli-born, Brooklyn-based painter. Langberg paints in the style of genre painting and portraiture and addresses issues of gender and sexuality by making love and desire a shared experience through the surface and subjects of his paintings.

DM to book one of our Art Walks or visit our website (link in Bio).

24/04/2022

С Пасхой вас, дорогие друзья.
Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates today.

The Second World War presented the Church of England with a spiritual crisis. In response to this, some church leaders saw the commissioning of new works of art for churches as a way to reaffirm cultural values after the end of the war. This led to an exceptionally rich time in the production of religious art for the modern age.

21/04/2022

Based in Brooklyn, María Berrío was born and grew up in Colombia. Her works, which are meticulously crafted from layers of Japanese paper, reflect on cross-cultural connections and global migration seen through the prism of her own history. Often, as in this painting depicting the artist’s son, the focus and characters in her works are children and their perceptions as seen through fantasy and magical realism.

Writing about the subject of childhood and painting from a mother‘s perspective, the artist comments, ‘Raising a child is a joy, but it is a joy with an undercurrent of sorrow, a joy tinged with the melancholic awareness of its brevity.’

DM to book one of our Art Walks or visit our website (link in Bio).

19/04/2022

Hernan Bas is celebrated for works that, permeated by an aura of eroticism and decadence, and loaded with codes and double-meanings, point to the intricacies of self-identity, while celebrating moments of transformation – the ordinary becoming extraordinary.

Supercuts (ghosts), 2019, is titled after a popular chain of hair salons in the US. Referring to the work, the artist comments ‘When I was assembling the portraits into a grid, I was immediately reminded of the photos framed on the wall of Supercuts – those standard model headshots from which you select the look you want from your stylist.’

DM to book one of our Art Walks or visit our website (link in Bio).

17/04/2022

Christians across the country are celebrating Easter this Sunday – it marks a time of hope, renewal and rebirth in the face of suffering and human tragedy.

May this Easter Sunday bring peace to your home.

Graham Sutherland, Crucifixion, 1946

15/04/2022

John Piper’s Chichester Cathedral reredos tapestry, 1966.

In the 20th century two industrialized world wars had forged a shared experience of suffering and conflict in Britain. It fell to artists and their patrons to give voice to this new national consciousness in a period of political, social and religious change. John Piper’s work is deeply bound up with this story.

Walter Hussey was Dean of Chichester Cathedral and famous for his patronage of the arts through the church. In his book ‘Patron of Art’ Hussey notes how he chose to follow Henry Moore’s advice to commission John Piper to create a worthy setting for the High Altar. The artist’s familiarity with the language of abstraction remains evident.

The Trinity is represented in the three central panels. God the Father is depicted by a white light, God the Son by the blue Tau Cross and the Holy Spirit as a flame-like wing, all united by a red equilateral triangle within a border of green scattered flames. The flanking panels depict the Gospel Evangelists St Matthew (a winged man), St Mark (a winged lion), St Luke (a winged ox), and St John (a winged eagle); beneath the Elements earth, air, fire and water.

As we journey through Holy Week and mark Jesus’ death upon the cross on Good Friday the Tau Cross seems particularly poignant with its symbolic wounds on each spar. Jesus’ role in creation from before the beginning of all things to the triumph of his death and resurrection are powerfully proclaimed in this extraordinary tapestry.

13/04/2022

Graham Sutherland (1903- 1980)
was an English artist known for his work in multiple media and as a painter of portraits. His work was much inspired by landscape and religion, and he designed the tapestry for the re-built Coventry Cathedral. His work was much inspired by landscape and religion, and he designed the tapestry for the re-built Coventry Cathedral.

11/04/2022

Idris Khan (born 1978) is a British artist based in London. Khan's work draws from a diverse range of cultural sources including literature, history, art, music and religion to create densely layered imagery that is both abstract and figurative.

Khan's photographs or scans originate from secondary source material – for instance, every page of the Qur'an, every Beethoven sonata, every William Turner postcard from Tate Britain, or every Bernd and Hilla Becher spherical gas holder.

As Khan describes: "It is a challenge to not define my work as a photograph but using the medium of photography to create something that exists on the surface of the paper and not to be transported back to an isolated moment in time."