I don’t proclaim to be an art expert, or even a knowledgable amateur. Prior to visiting this major retrospective exhibition, despite his fame and acclamation, I couldn’t say I knew who Peter Howson was.

Born in London, Howson spent his formative years in Ayrshire before venturing off to study at the Glasgow School of Art. Today, he is a highly celebrated figurative artist.

During the early 1990s, he took on the role of the official ‘British war artist’ for the conflict in Bosnia, an experience that left a profound imprint on his mental and emotional wellbeing. A decade later, he found comfort in Christianity, a shift that brought a religious focus to his work. In recent years, he has crafted artistic responses to Brexit, the pandemic, and various other contemporary events.

Admittedly, Howson’s figurative and almost cartoonish style doesn’t particularly resonate with me. However, in a three-floor mega-exhibition, there are bound to be a few stand-out pieces. Below, I’ve highlighted three artworks that captivated me more than the rest.

This is My Tale Shall Be Told, a 1995 work which is apparently based on William Hogarth’s 1730s series A Rake’s Progress. I’m not familiar enough with art history to appreciate that.

I liked this because of the surrealism and the bold colours. I liked that the girl in the background had a Munch-like scream at the scene of the bearded lady inexplicably attempting to ride a dog. I like the way that the child in the foreground is contorted in a way which looks natural at first glance, but impossible on a closer inspection. The recognisable inclusion of the ‘fat controller’ gave this a grounding in the real world.

I especially enjoyed the way that the paintbrushes were left colourless in such a colourful scene.

This is a 1994 piece from Bosnia, called Serb with Child. I was struck by the abstract nature of this piece, which isn’t typical for Howson. I thought it said something about the way that the anger and violence were more prominent for him than the specifics of the awful situation.

From the same period, this is House Warming. Here, the contrast between the horrific, violent events in the foreground and the everyday scene in the top-left of the canvas is striking.

This helped to bring home to me the reality of living in a war zone. The contrast between everyday life and the battle surrounding it has been much-observed in the current conflict in Ukraine. But, as only art can, I think this representation made me ponder the reality of living through a situation like that.

I also thought that the juxtaposition said something about how close we all are to violent conflict: it seemed like it was commenting on the fragility of society, and how easily any society can tip over into unrecognisable violence.

When the Apple Ripens: Peter Howson at 65 continues at the City Art Centre until 1 October.

This small exhibition covers 250 years of artistic representations of Scottish landscapes… although in a slightly odd curatorial decision, some paintings are of landscapes in other parts of the world.

This is a small exhibition, but there were a few pictures which were new to me, and which I particularly enjoyed. I didn’t take any of the pictures in this post, as photography was forbidden.

This is one of Joan Eardley’s seascapes. I think it is the one I saw in the gallery, showing Catterline near Stonehaven, but I may be mistaken. My memory isn’t photographic, and there’s no published catalogue to compare against.

I like the dynamism and emotion that this painting captures: it’s recognisably a seascape, but it strikes me that there’s much more in it to explore. I particularly like the contrast between the chaotic sea and coastline compared to the calmness of the sky. It drew me in.

This is William MacTaggart’s 1974 work, Autumn Leaves. Regular readers will know that my colour vision isn’t great, but I love the warmth of the oranges and reds of this painting. I was drawn to the inspired combination of the autumn scene with sunset, given that autumn feels a bit like the sunset of the year. There’s something peaceful and reflective about this painting.

I also like the prominence of the blue and purple elements which wouldn’t necessarily be expected, and the recognisable building in the back of the picture. It was another picture that I found absorbing.

This is The Valley of the Shadow, Loch Coruisk by Robert Burns. Represented as it is above, this painting doesn’t really move me. In the gallery, it seemed considerably more abstract, the forms of the mountains and the loch being much less clearly discernible. It turns out that it’s actually disappointingly literal.

This is, I think, attributable to something that irritated me throughout this exhibition: the lighting. The gallery seems to have positioned spotlights on each painting—so far, so normal—but they seem to be undiffused. This means that the glare and reflections on canvases makes some works really quite difficult to see: I had to duck and weave to get an impression. I’m not sure if the space has been recently refitted or something, but it’s really not working as well as it could.

Shifting Vistas: 250 Years of Scottish Landscape continues at the City Art Centre until June next year.

Before I visited this exhibition, I had no idea who Chris Killip was: perhaps that makes me too ignorant to have an opinion on this major retrospective of his work.

If you are as clueless as me, then I should explain that he was one of the most celebrated and important post-war documentary photographers of the UK. He was especially known for his 1980s photography of Tyneside, published in a landmark book called In Flagrante in 1988. His work intended to show, as he put it, ‘not those who made history, but those who had history done to them.’ He was born on the Isle of Man in 1946 and died from lung cancer in 2020.

Killip was a co-founder at the original creator of the Side Gallery in Newcastle, which—with unbelievable timing—closed due to a lack of funding in April 2023, while this major retrospective exhibition was running just a stone’s throw away.

When I visited last week, a couple of months into the run, the exhibition was heaving. It was like something at the British Museum. The place was packed.

I’m waffling. And I’m waffling because I’m trying to minimise the fact that this sort of photography does very little for me. I don’t feel any emotional connection to it, and I don’t feel drawn to it. It just isn’t my kind of thing. I much preferred the personality and humour on display in Mark Pinder’s retrospective earlier this year. I also wasn’t keen on the decision to display the photos in glass frames in a brightly lit environment, which meant that reflections made them—in a very practical sense—quite hard to actually see.

I’m trying to minimise that because I don’t want to put you off. Even The Telegraph—the newspaper least likely to enjoy photographs of poor people from the North—gave it four stars. The interest and joy that the photographs in this exhibition inspired in other visitors was greater than anything else I’ve seen this year, bar Vermeer. I don’t to hold back anyone from having that kind of experience… even if it didn’t have that effect on me.

The Chris Killip retrospective continues at the Baltic until 3 September.

The picture at the top is my photograph of Killip’s photograph called Bus Stop I. I chose this entirely because the name reminded me of Diamond Geezer’s detailed coverage of Bus Stop M. This probably says something about my level of engagement with the work.

This book is a collection of photographs of the Apollo missions to the moon. I managed to pick it up for £10 in a sale, while Waterstones are still listing it at £60.

The photographs taken during the missions were obviously taken on film. The film has been stored in a secure freezer ever since, the better to stop it degrading. The films were recently defrosted, cleaned, and scanned at extremely high resolution. Despite this, the quality of the images themselves remains relatively poor: for example, as they were designed to be back-lit, they tend to be underexposed.

Andy Saunders took those detailed scans and manipulated them to produce authentic yet extremely clear versions. He talks in detail in the book about how he went about this, and how he chose to judge the line between accurate representation and artistic manipulation.

I found this fascinating to flick through. I had expected to be drawn mostly to the detailed photography of the technology of the era, but in fact, that didn’t affect me much at all.

There were three things that stood out.

Firstly, the wonderful photographs of the astronauts. Many of these look like beautifully shot and lit portraits. They bring out the humanity of the endeavour, and it helped me to understand the personal risk each of them took by participating in this programme. Every human being who has ever walked on the moon is included in this book. It is also impossible not to be struck by the fact that all twelve are white American men.

Secondly, the astonishing pictures of the earth. I’ve seen many of these pictures countless times over the years, but seeing them presented in this book, in stunning clarity, gives something of a new perspective.

Thirdly, the focus on the USA. It has never really struck me before how absurd it is to have a spacecraft floating in magnificent isolation with the letters ‘USA’ painted on it. I’ve never truly considered the madness of planting an American flag on the moon. But there is something about contemplating the astonishing photographs in this book which made me think about how narrow one’s view of the world must be to ‘brand’ the mission as the product of a country.

A couple of months ago, I watched and recommended the film Apollo 11, composed entirely of archive footage of that mission. My reaction to the film was to be awed; my reaction to these photographs was more contemplative. I think both are worth seeking out.

This is a massive exhibition by the British-Ghanaian artist Larry Achiampong, including everything from a feature-length film (showing five times daily) to a collection of (I think) twelve computer games, even a shelf of books to sit and read. One could easily spend days in this exhibition and still not see all the work. My brief visit barely scratched the surface.

Achiampong’s work explores our sense of identity. The scope is broad, incorporating everything from the way our identities can entrench inequality through class or cultural displacement, through to digital constructs of identity.

The most immediately arresting bits of work in the exhibition are from Achiampong’s Relic Traveller series, which includes a series of life-size space suits throughout the gallery. The narrative behind these is that they represent African travellers collecting the relics of their colonial past, found in the West.

I was also taken with a video installation in this series, Reliquary 2, which reflects on Achiampong’s separation from his children during the covid lockdowns. It features edited drone footage of Brighton’s ruined pier, among other sites, with cartoon space people overlaid. The audio features Achiampong directly addressing his children.

The installation Detention, shown in the photograph above, also caught my eye. This is partly inspired by the opening titles of The Simpsons, and partly reflects the way that politicians and social media posters repeat certain key phrases endlessly.

Yet, from the whole exhibition, the thing that struck me most was the atmosphere. Achiampong’s work is personal, he features his family in several pieces, and his work invites visitors to sit on beanbags or benches to watch video installations, to play computer games, to sit on maps, to take books from a shelf and read them. Somehow, whether it’s the work or the curation, the impression is unusually inviting, oddly warm-hearted. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit.

Wayfinder continues at The Baltic until 29 October.

This exhibition aims to show three different approaches to representing nature through painting.

It opens with pre-Raphaelite paintings, showing their highly detailed, almost photo-realistic approach to capturing the world. We move through rustic naturalistic paintings, which are still fairly realistic in style but concentrate more on character and atmosphere than fine detail. And we close with paintings by British Impressionists, who forwent the realistic to concentrate almost entirely on the wider experience of the places featured.

To give you an idea of my level of ignorance, before I went to this exhibition, I couldn’t have told you anything about the Pre-Raphaelite ideals or their approach to representing the world. I therefore felt educated by this exhibition: it was very well-curated, combining clear text with a plethora of well-chosen paintings which underlined each of the points the text made.

As you’d expect, some paintings struck me and others didn’t. I usually enjoy more abstract works, and was particularly taken with Samuel John Peploe’s On the Brittany Coast and Moses Adams’s Harbour Scene at Night, Runswick.

I thoroughly enjoyed this exhibition.

‘Essence of Nature’ continues at The Laing until 14 October.

Alex Mulholland is a Newcastle-based street artist, known as Mul, who is perhaps best known for his famous ‘running heart’ character. There is a vibrant, cartoonish, playful aspect to his work, which he has coined ‘disco style’. His work is seen in many locations in the North East, and he also has pieces in Rome, Berlin, and Amsterdam.

I’ve been to see his very short-run ‘pop-up takeover’ exhibition, which is as playful as you’d expect from his work. There was a mobile interactive element to the exhibition—one could point one’s phone at pieces, and they would ‘come to life’. I’m afraid I didn’t engage, preferring to look at the work with my eyes rather than through a phone screen.

Perhaps because I didn’t engage with that element, I’ll confess that the whole thing felt a tiny bit flat to me. It’s great to see Mul getting recognition, but seeing a load of his work collected together in a gallery isn’t nearly as fun as happening across it in ‘the real world’.

I did, however, enjoy the video installation showing the creation of one of his street works, and I enjoyed the way he had brought the ephemera of the real world—signs, tyres, etc—into the gallery.

The three-day pop-up of ‘The Art of Disco’ continues at the Baltic, but only until tomorrow.

Wendy and I have been lucky enough to visit the blockbuster Donatello exhibition at the V&A. As the museum puts it, this was an opportunity for us to ‘explore the exceptional talents of the Renaissance master Donatello, arguably the greatest sculptor of all time’.

Except… well… it didn’t feel that way. We were a little pushed for time, but found it a bit of a challenge to work out what we were supposed to take from each item. For example, the ‘God the Father’ from Milan Cathedral, above, has no connection whatsoever with Donatello. The label suggested that the technique used to make it was uncertain, but that it might have been a technique that Donatello might have also sometimes used. Right.

And the exhibition rather continued in this vein. Neither of us knows the first thing about Renaissance art, and so perhaps we’re not really the target audience, but we left with no real appreciation for why Donatello was so especially revered.

We did both comment that the Donatello works seemed to stand out in the exhibition, thought couldn’t quite work out whether that was due to an inherent quality of them or the curation.

I was struck by the incredible detail of Donatello’s rilievo schiacciato, a phrase I’ll never remember a week from now which refers to the low-relief marble carvings like the one above. Weirdly, these felt a bit tucked into a corner in the exhibition, with more space and focus seemingly given over to Donatello’s possible (but uncertain) training as a goldsmith.

I think maybe I’ve been spoiled by Vermeer, but I was left thinking that I’d have preferred there to be less in this exhibition to allow the Donatello to breathe, and to help us understand why he’s so revered.

‘Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance’ continues at the V&A until 11 June.

Pianodrome makes and exhibits seriously arresting sculptures from discarded pianos, which Wendy and I happened across in an entirely unexpected place recently: an abandoned former Debenhams.

If you worry—like we did—that this is a bit of a ‘waste’ of a serviceable instrument, then fear not. It turns out that they make the fixable pianos they find available for adoption, reasoning that ‘the best thing for an old piano is to find a new home.’

Wendy and I went along to see this 2022 Tate Britain commission which is currently being exhibited at the Baltic. It’s an installation made up of over 100 life-size figures, each elaborately dressed, waving flags or wearing masks or carrying banners or playing the drums or riding a horse or any number of other protest- or procession-like activities.

The first impression is one of overwhelm: there is just far too much to take in, even as you wander around and between the groups of figures. The more each figure is considered, the more startling details meet the eye: a share certificate here, a colonial map there, prints of troubling artworks in between, topped with some imagery of royalty. It’s a lot.

And really, that was as far as we got with it: there were too many ideas all at once to really feel like it was saying anything in particular. The work that has gone into the piece is astounding, but we didn’t really have any profound reaction to it. We didn’t leave the exhibition with a different view on the world.

In the Baltic setting, unlike in Tate Britain, a balcony allows visitors to consider the work from above. This has the secondary effect of visitors considering the figures appearing to become part of the procession themselves, when viewed from this angle. This probably changes the work in an interesting way, but it’s hard to know for sure when this is the only setting I’ve seen it in.

The Procession remains at the Baltic until 11 June.