Thomas Cooper Gotch – The Exile (1930)

She could be anyone, so you get close to see her. The fiery monotone background does not steal away from her mystery and, in fact, recedes as your gaze fixates on her. She looks like a rag doll dressed up hastily by her child-mother and abandoned carelessly on a chair quickly afterwards, slouching under the […]

Emily Carr – Church in Yuquot Village (1929)

She couldn’t believe it. In fact, she could barely lift up her eyes to look at the thing! There it was, her painting, hanging in the dining room of one of Canada’s most talented artists, a man whom she greatly admired. People were gathered all around it, gasping with delight — quite an unusual reaction […]

Lin Fengmian’s Wild Geese

“You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert repenting”, is how Mary Oliver starts off Wild Geese, a short, heart-warming poem about coming home to oneself, the same way wild geese return to their nesting grounds after long […]

Mordecai Ardon – In Memory of Stefan (1972)

A fiery sphere. A horizontal line. Don’t stare too much into Mordecai Ardon’s Red Sun or you will get blind spots and reconsider your childhood drawings as masterpieces. Maybe your social media feeds, with their unverified yet ubiquitous quotations of Picasso, were right after all: every child is an artist. Ardon, a Polish-born Jewish artist […]

Herbert James Gunn and His Mona Lisa

At thirty-one-years old Herbert James Gunn’s life was only just beginning. Sure, the Scotsman had already been married once, fathered three children, fought in World War I and wandered through the cities of Europe and the sun-drenched north of Africa, milestones which would take many of us a lifetime to achieve. But there he was […]