Nicholas Rena: after Matisse

I like the contrast between the simplicity of the pots
and the fussiness of the chandelier

The Holburne Museum in Bath is in the kind of grand building you can well imagine wealthy and socially well-connected people visiting during Bath's heyday as a spa town. Opportunities for swirling around the ballroom are a bit limited at the moment because there is a very interesting exhibition of ceramics currently on display until 17 May.

The Holburne Museum houses the collection of Sir William Holburne of which there are over 4000 objects. This was bequeathed to the people of Bath by his sister Mary Anne Barbara Holburne (1802-1882) with the intention of it forming the basis of a museum of art for Bath.

I must admit that I don't particularly share Sir William's passion for silver, porcelain, furniture, miniatures, books, coins and so on, although I'm always happy to spend some time with old-master paintings, so I was very glad to see there was some contemporary art on display.

Nicholas Rena has created this installation of new work specifically for this room and has made an interesting response to Henri Matisse's (1869-1954) still life paintings. He has evoked the colours and tone of Matisse's work but expressed them in a completely different medium. The sight of them in their imposing glass cabinet (known as a vitrine) creates a wonderful contrast to the items on display around the room.

From the front The Holburne Museum appears to be an entirely classical design but at the rear of the building a new, ambitious ceramic and glass extension was added in 2011 which was designed by Eric Parry Architects. This allows the museum to both look backwards to its classical roots and look forward by embracing contemporary art and architecture. Interestingly Nicholas Rena studied architecture with Eric Parry but has obviously found another way of expressing space and what you can do with three dimensions. This is the second of five contemporary interventions at the Holburne supported by Arts Council England.

Grayson Perry: Who are you?

My map to 'Who are you?' that I clutched all the way round the exhibits

A friend and I visited the National Portrait Gallery yesterday to explore Grayson Perry's exhibition 'Who are you?' I've been pondering this question all day and the answer is 'I'm not sure'.

Fourteen exhibits have been artfully displayed within a number of galleries that contain artwork on permanent show. This was a collaborative project with Channel 4 and was shown on television before Christmas 2014 and, as the leaflet explains, they 'are not primarily concerned with what the subjects look like' they are concerned with identity.

The first item is a self-portrait of Grayson Perry but unlike most portraits you don't get any idea of what his appearance might be like. This is because it is an intricate, visual mind-map in four large etchings of his experiences, anxieties and relationships. I found it so interesting I could have spent my entire visit absorbed by this one piece alone.

This is where the leaflet came in very handy because it too was a map, of the gallery, and for me it turned into a comfort blanket so at least I knew where I was even if I didn't know who I was. And funnily enough piece number two is called 'Comfort Blanket'.  It is an enormous tapestry that wouldn't look out of place in a Tudor palace and was designed to be reminiscent of a bank note with the Queen prominently displayed on the right hand side.

As we trailed through the galleries we stopped to look at the permanent collection of portraits of the great and the good and these were very much concerned with how the subjects were portrayed. There are a number of portraits of Winston Churchill, who died 50 years ago, starting young but getting older and fatter but still recognisably the same person.

On we trailed visiting exhibit number three: Melanie, Georgina and Sarah looking glorious in their shiny glaze. I was particularly taken with 'The Ashford Hijab' (exhibit number six) but sadly I can't find a link to it to show you. I also enjoyed seeing the Suffragettes, a bust of Queen Mary and self portraits by the artist Henry Tonks who put fear into many an art student while he taught at the Slade School of Fine Art.

I was a bit stunned on entering room number 29 when I thought I was looking at a painting of Josef Stalin wearing a white uniform only to discover it was of Sir Frank Swettenham (1850-1946) by John Singer Sargent. I found the 'Memory Jar' (exhibit number eight) very poignant as it's concerned with the loss of memories as a result of dementia but I cheered up enormously when I ran into the portraits of the Brontë sisters by their brother Branwell which I have seen in reproduction but never in 'real life'.

I had trouble finding 'The Earl of Essex' (exhibit number 12) and my companion had to lead me to it so small was it and hidden in plain view in a cabinet. I was glad to see it and enjoyed its commentary on the quest for celebrity and instant fame. And the final piece is called 'The Deaf' and this was designed to look like a punk rock poster. It makes it clear that the deaf regard themselves as a distinct culture to be celebrated not a section of society suffering from a disability.

As someone who tends to stick to drawing and painting realistic scenes with the occasional foray into the abstract I'm impressed with the range of approaches Grayson Perry has employed in this exploration of what lies beneath the surface of appearances and the meaning of personal identity.

National Portrait Gallery: until 15 March 2015

Catherine the not-so-great

Today was the first meeting of the year of the Freelance Media Group. We meet at the Groucho Club, the private hang out of the Very Important People who inhabit Media Land. Sometimes you'll spot a celebrity or two which is all good fun but you must not, whatever you do, engage them in conversation.

Anyway there is fat chance of that happening since we meet in a room up several flights of stairs away from all the schmoozing. Here I found myself sitting next to a journalist who revealed that she covers royal stories and she politely agreed when I pointlessly gushed 'Ooh, you'll be busy when the baby arrives.' Then I asked her what she thought of the Duchess of Cambridge's new portrait by Paul Emsley on display at the National Portrait Gallery which in the last few days has been subjected to a barrage of criticism. She assured me that it looks much better 'in the flesh' than it did in the papers. So I decided to check it out for myself since we were just a short walk away from the gallery.

My first impression was that it is far too big. It is more-or-less 3ft x 4ft. I think it would have had more impact if it had been half that size. I imagine it could be quite terrifying receiving a commission to paint a royal portrait and maybe that is why Catherine has ended up looking a bit lifeless. I much preferred the portrait further along the corridor of Mo Mowlam (a British MP and Labour minister) painted by John Keane in 2001. This portrait is full of life, you can see the brush strokes and although Mo Mowlam is in repose you can get a sense of her vitality. Poor Catherine by contrast doesn't appear to have any vitality. However if you turn your head slightly you can see her engagement photos hanging in a neighbouring gallery where you can see that she is clearly a very lively young woman.

This is just the first official portrait of Catherine and no doubt in time we will be able to chart the progress of her royal life in future portraits in the same way we can with Her Majesty the Queen who appears to have sat for more portraits than some of us have had hot dinners - let's hope they might have a bit more life in them.

Fabiola complaint

Following my blog titled: 'What makes art ART?' (21 May), where I grumbled about the Fabiola exhibition Marta made the sensible suggestion that I tell the National Portrait Gallery what I think about it. So I have and this is my letter to them. I am hoping to get a reply and if I do I will post it here for your amusement. The important thing to me is that I feel better for having written it and I will stop fuming about it.

I have always enjoyed my visits to the National Portrait Gallery which have often been made at lunchtimes or when I've been on the way to somewhere else. The NPG has become part of my cultural life. I have nearly always been favourably impressed with the standard of craftsmanship and appreciate being able to drop in on Henry VIII and people currently in the public eye on the same visit.

So for the first time I have to write and say how disappointed I was with Francis Alÿs' exhibition 'Fabiola'. I find the accompanying leaflet justifying the exhibition both pretentious and incomprehensible. This quote just sums it up for me 'By installing it in the National Portrait Gallery, he solicits the kinds of aesthetic and historical questions typically addressed to Old Master artworks, questions, pertaining to authorship, iconography, function, originality and uniqueness.' I'm sorry, but this strikes me as a load of old baloney considering that the content of the exhibition is a job lot of amateur paintings collected from junk shops and they don't rate such high blown praise.

The leaflet mentions that this installation has also been exhibited in New York and Los Angeles so I can only assume that a good number of art curators in the western world have been collectively conned into thinking this is material worth throwing good money at.

This experience won't stop me from visiting your fine gallery but I will be prepared to question future exhibits more in the future than I have in the past.

Post script written on 24 September: The exhibition has now closed and I never did receive a reply. I wonder if my complaint was even read by anyone - I suspect not.

What makes art ART?

Yesterday I had a job interview and had some time to kill before my appointment so I drifted into the National Portrait gallery near Trafalgar Square. I'd already had my lunch, been to the bank, done some window shopping around Covent Garden and was getting a bit bored and wanted to find somewhere dump my portfolio and have a mooch around. I considered going up to the top floor to look at the Tudors because I haven't seen Henry VIII for really quite a while but chose to stick to the galleries on the first floor since I had my eye on the time.

Tucked away in two small galleries away from the corridor full of photos of famous people there is an exhibition entitled Fabiola. It consists of around 300 paintings, tapestries, and a collage made from beans and lentils of the same subject who was a fourth-century Christian saint known as Fabiola who evidently is the protector of abused women and patron saint of nurses. She is shown as a young woman in profile, facing left and wearing a crimson veil. Apparently all these images are based on a 19th century painting by an artist called Jean-Jacques Henner which is now lost. They were created by anonymous craftspeople and artists who were mostly amateurs and all the pieces on show were made by hand and not mechanically reproduced.

There is a comfy seat in the middle of the first gallery which looked very inviting so I sat on that with several other people and began to inspect the images of this woman on the walls. It was like looking at wallpaper because you are looking at what is basically a repeating pattern, young woman, profile, crimson veil etc which made me feel as though I was drifting into a trance (or perhaps it was the effects of my lunch). I roused myself before I fell into a deep sleep and went into the neighbouring gallery where there were yet more of these images on display and I began to think 'yeah and so what'.

I suppose you could describe this exhibition as an installation because the artist whose name is attached to it, Francis Alÿs, hasn't as far as I could tell actually created anything in these two rooms. It represents his collection which he acquired over a period of 15 years from antique shops and flea markets in Europe and the Americas which for all I know also represented a bit of an obsession. The accompanying brochure seems full of bullshit to me and here is an example: 'In the eyes of its creator, artist Francis Alÿs, this ensemble of artefacts invites investigation as a collection. Bla, bla, bla.'

I like to leave an exhibition feeling stimulated and if possible inspired to go home and produce more work but this left me feeling duped and asking the question 'why did the National Portrait gallery, which has an international reputation, fall for this? It had nothing really to impart about portraiture and if this artist had a collection of used toothbrushes collected over 15 years would they have also put that on display?' It made me think of the 'emperor's new clothes'.