-
Jan 20, 2025 | 
thetimes.com | Laura Freeman |Nancy Durrant
-
Dec 6, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Laura Freeman
Nick Cave is silhouetted against a window in the dining room of Leighton House in west London. The blinds are low, but beyond it is a bright, freezing day. His head and dark hair are in shadow, but round him is a halo of winter sun. It’s an apt trick of the light. We are here to talk about the Devil and the better and worse angels of our nature.
-
Dec 3, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Laura Freeman
You think the worst of the Turner prize was in the Nineties and early Noughties? When Damien Hirst won for the shark in formaldehyde (1995) and Chris Ofili won for the elephant dung (1998) and Tracey Emin didn’t win for the unmade bed (1999) and Martin Creed won for the lights going on and off and Madonna swore on Channel 4 (2001)? When some bloke in a frock won for his provocative pots (2003)?
-
Dec 1, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Laura Freeman
The first thing you notice about Lindsey Mendick’s studio is that it is warm. This is unusual. Artists’ garrets, with their north-facing windows, are traditionally freezing. Tracey Emin, proprietor of TKE Studios in Margate, which gives residencies to artists aged 24 to 36 believes that her students should not shiver for their art. It’s thanks to these digs that Mendick tells me it’s the first time in her working life she’s had a studio with heating.
-
Nov 29, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Laura Freeman
The trouble with art lovers is that they tend to have rather high standards. If your measure of beauty is a Titian, then Christmas tat and tinsel just aren’t going to cut it when it comes to presents.
-
Nov 28, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Laura Freeman
Art books are so much more than £100 coffee table whoppers — in these picks you’ll discover a defence of the “cancelled” artist Paul Gauguin, plus adventures in the murky world of stolen antiquities, London’s “Del Boy” fine art auctioneers and the country’s church graveyards. And that’s before you start on our obsession with cats (Thomas Hardy called his Kiddlewinkpoops-Trot).
-
Nov 21, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Laura Freeman
If you were a biscuit, what sort of biscuit would you be? Think carefully. The answer you give — Hobnob, Bourbon, digestive or custard cream — could determine your future social, academic, professional and romantic prospects. We live in the age of the personality test. These range from the silly (which Wicked character are you?) to the quasi-scientific (which of the 16 Myers-Briggs types are you?) to the diagnostic (take our quick ADHD test to find out if you have it).
-
Nov 18, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Laura Freeman
Were the Eighties really this dreary? Clearly, they weren’t one long naked tennis match in the manner of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals, but was there not some glamour, some aspiration, some gloss? Should there not be more taffeta? I confess that my memories of the decade are hazy. I arrived in December 1987 and so my impressions are more pushchair than panoramic. I had been looking forward to this exhibition as a series of snapshots of the Britain into which I was born.
-
Nov 18, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Laura Freeman
As the daughter of a long-suffering Spurs fan, I have come to know well the concept of “Spursy”. Applied to Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, it means to snatch defeat from the very jaws of victory, to lose on the final penalty, to squander your chance of winning a cup — again. Spursy is the word that came to mind at the official unveiling of a £7,200 statue to the England captain Harry Kane.
-
Nov 12, 2024 | 
thetimes.com | Laura Freeman
Some artists you have to see in the flesh. Reproduction dulls and flattens their work. For no artist is this truer than Frank Auerbach, who died on Monday at the age of 93. When I say “in the flesh”, I mean flesh. His paintings are scarred and pock-marked with paint. He raised welts with his brush, gouged grooves in the surface. He was part painter, part sculptor, practically chiselling and plastering the canvas. He presented two problems for curators.
