From icons to soup cans-trawling the Net for Things You Can Use brought to you courtesy of the Rondebosch Boys' High School Library (If you would like to receive a weekly newsletter of the latest items in this Scoop just mail me at library@rondebosch.com)
In a city crowded with monuments to the past, Roberto Lugo learned his first art lessons from hip-hop and Philadelphia’s murals of his neighbors, teachers, and local legends.
Today, he translates that street-level canon into ceramics, rendering the people who formed him and the wider fabric of America. His pottery expands who is seen and celebrated to include his own family and the community he’s built around his kiln and studio. This film was produced by RAVA films in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art.
From Cape Verde to London and beyond, Amadeo Carvalho is a self-taught, London-based contemporary visual artist putting Black identity, memory and heritage at the heart of his work. Blending painting, poetry and photography, his art explores the stories, silences and connections that shape who we are. This weekend, his powerful collection "Portraits of Absence" arrives at the AKAA Art Fair here in Paris, where it will be exhibited by the curatorial platform Casa Vicência. He spoke to us in Perspective
A rejected exhibition ignites a revolution. See how a Paris outcry reshaped what art could be.
Travel from the shock of Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass at the Salon des Refusés to Monet chasing steam and sunlight at Gare Saint-Lazare. Watch Renoir turn crowds into living light, and Degas bend space with staircases and line. Then step into Seurat’s dots and discipline, Cezanne’s solid color-structures at Mont Sainte-Victoire, and Gauguin’s search for the primal and the spiritual far from Paris. Finally, feel Van Gogh’s blazing pigments and why a simple bedroom carried a message meant for a friend.
Police used tear gas and water cannon to disperse protesters outside Colombia’s National Museum in Bogota after the Culture Ministry ordered the removal of 30 exhibition pieces on LGBTQ rights, feminist struggles and assassinated political leaders.
We asked three artists and two writers to tell us about their inspiration from the Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963) and her surrealist universe, where precision and magic intersect.
”She was a brave woman. She gave me energy. She permitted me to be wild. She allowed me to be wild because before I was wild, she was wild,” says the acclaimed Cuban artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons.
”What I have to say doesn’t need to be screamed or yelled.” We met California-based artist Hayley Barker while working on a print and spoke with her about her fascination with both nature and color.
”I think everything that I have to say with color can be said softly and with intention. Color to me is everything. It is...the feeling, the temperature, the weight or weightlessness, the gravity, the roughness or softness, the ease or the difficulty, like the sadness or the joy. It's all of those things rolled up.”
Alma Thomas was an American painter and art educator best known for her mosaic-style abstract compositions inspired by nature and space exploration. 🌻
Observe how her artistic focus evolved across her career. Her early figurative studies and quiet compositions shifted into bold, large-scale abstract paintings defined by energetic color-field patterns. 🎨
Caravaggio broke away from traditional Renaissance painting methods by bypassing traditional paper studies. Instead, he worked straight onto the canvas, placing live models in darkened rooms and using strong, single-source light to shape his figures out of deep shadows 🖌️
His dramatic approach to realism and intense light influenced artists across Europe, transforming storytelling through art.
Search Caravaggio on Google Arts & Culture to discover more about his life and techniques.
Chihiro Iwasaki was a Japanese artist and illustrator celebrated for her delicate watercolor depictions of flowers and children. 🎏
Observe how her artistic focus evolved across her career. She combined traditional Japanese and Chinese ink painting techniques into soft watercolor compositions, dropping pigment onto wet surfaces without outline sketches to capture centered on childhood peace. 🌸
Michael Craig-Martin’s "Music" (2026), created by the artist in collaboration with the W1 Curates public art platform, is viewable twenty-four hours a day on the exterior of the Flannels flagship store on Oxford Street in London through November 4. Following the work’s premiere at Hï Ibiza, a special audio component mixed by Subjective (a collaboration between Goldie and James Davidson) has been added for its London presentation, with a fully immersive audiovisual experience to be found at the W1 Curates space located in the basement of Flannels.
“It captures something more than a sound. It’s about seeing. It’s about feeling. It’s love, it’s family, it’s protest, it’s joy and struggle.” —Ebony L. Haynes (@ebotron) on Roy DeCarava’s the sound i saw, currently on view at #DavidZwirnerLosAngeles
Take a quiet moment to step into a misty woodland 🌧️🍃
Painted in 1914 by Kyoto-based Konoshima Ōkoku, this folding screen blends traditional Japanese artistic traditions with direct observations from life. After its debut exhibition, the artwork actually disappeared for over a century before resurfacing in 2021.
Today Henri Matisse’s the red studio is considered one of the landmarks of modern art, seen by thousands of visitors at the Museum of Modern art in New York. But before arriving there in 1948 it spent more than a decade hanging in a London nightclub.
When Matisse painted the red studio in 1911 it was one of the strangest pictures anyone had ever seen - a room almost completely consumed by red – furniture reduced to outlines, paintings hanging on walls that barely seem to exist, and a grandfather clock with 12 numbers but no hands. Even Matisse wasn't entirely sure what he had created and nobody wanted to buy it.
1789 shattered old certainties and ignited Romantic art. This episode traces how revolution, the sublime, and the individual reshaped painting across Europe.
From the fall of the Bastille, Western artists challenged neoclassical rules and elevated private feeling, nature, and the heroic or tragic individual. We unpack Edmund Burke's pairing of beauty and the sublime and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's call for the dignity of the individual that fueled this turn.
Some of Iraq’s most significant archaeological treasures damaged by ISIL during its occupation have now been restored. ISIL’s propaganda videos, which circulated worldwide, showed its fighters destroying ancient Assyrian artefacts and blowing up historic sites. Since then, experts have painstakingly pieced together thousands of fragments to restore the damaged artefacts.
“The more you train your awareness muscle, the more aware you are.” French artist Colonel Thierry Geoffroy turns urgent global crises into art that awakens awareness and inspires action.
For Thierry Geoffroy, also known as Colonel, art must respond to the present before it’s too late: “I’m interested to see if I can be in advance of the catastrophe,” he continues: “If we’re too late, then we’re too late.” Geoffroy describes his practice as “format art about emergencies.” Each format has a set of rules that allows it to be repeated anywhere in the world. In his work ‘Emergency Room’, the artist creates and exhibits new works in response to the day’s news. Every afternoon, yesterday’s works are replaced, followed by a public debate: “I want to take the question: Why do museums not address urgent matter at the moment they happen? The ‘Emergency Room’ came as a solution.”
We visited Tracey Emin in her London home, and suddenly the world stood still. Watch an in-depth conversation about her life, career, and unbroken will to make a difference.
”There was a period in my life where the outside axis pulled me too strongly. I was getting mixed up with things, seeing too much, the world, everything, traveling too much, wanting too much, being too greedy, not understanding what I had right within me. And I think as an artist that's the most important thing. It´s what I say to lots of young artists: look at what you've got inside and work outwards. Don't keep trying to get this and trying to get that.”
“I never accepted reality as I saw it.” We visited Chilean-Peruvian artist Alejandro Cardenas in his Madrid studio and entered a space in which there is more to the world than what you see.
”I always had this suspicion that the world is kind of an illusion. And the reason I felt that way was that I could go to sleep at night, have a dream, and be in another world that had nothing to do with this one. It looked nothing like this world, had its own rules, had its own physics, had its own creatures, had its own...everything.”
Jamaican-born artist Rudi Patterson’s romanticized paintings of his island home were created largely from memory in his tiny West London council flats.
Look closer to dive into his vivid colors and intuitive depictions of Caribbean life – guided simply, as the artist said, by a love for painting and natural harmony.
Take in a panoramic view of the Hudson River Valley, captured straight from the artist's memory 🍂🎨
Jasper Francis Cropsey painted this massive landscape while living in London to showcase the beauty of the American countryside to a British audience. To prove the bold red and gold foliage was real and not an exaggeration, he even brought actual North American leaves to his gallery display.
Hint: To capture herself at work, it’s thought the artist maybe positioned two mirrors facing each other at 45-degree angles. Her gold chain features a mask pendant, directly referencing Cesare Ripa’s handbook for artists.
The piece entered King Charles I's collection and features her initials signed on the stone slab used for grinding pigments.
"Seeing Through: Jia Aili’s Parallel Paintings" is a major exhibition of new works by the artist on view at Gagosian, Beverly Hills. This is Jia’s first solo presentation at the gallery in Beverly Hills and marks his first solo project with Gagosian since 2019’s "Combustion" in New York. A key figure in Chinese contemporary painting, Jia crafts expansive, dynamic compositions that engage with classic art historical modes.
The key-shaped canvases in Nate Lowman: Hanging Out from precisely rendered copies to nearly abstract, diagrammatic forms. Some draw on the artist’s personal photographs, while others use decorative finishes to distinguish one key from another.
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