How to Read Paintings: At the Moulin Rouge by Toulouse-Lautrec
This scene shows a group of friends in the bar of the Moulin Rouge. The figures socialise against a backdrop... View Article
The Artwork That Inspired My Debut Novel
How one work of art can give rise to another I’ve admired this painting for more than 20 years. I... View Article
What is a Museum?
Cultural encyclopedia or appropriated plunder? I recently took a trip to Athens in Greece. Whilst I was there I visited... View Article
Why I Write In Pen & Paper
Writing by hand helps me to express exactly what I want to express.
Can Art Clean Up Dirty Money?
In the Guggenheim, New York, people are throwing down a confetti of paper flyers from the famous curved balconies of... View Article
Why Learning a Musical Instrument Will Make You Happier
Learning to play is a most reliable source of pleasure. A few year ago I went to a party, a... View Article
How To Design Better Online Reading Environments
Online and offline reading experiences compared. Whenever I attempt to read anything online that is more than a few hundred... View Article
How Digital Changes the Nature of Original Art
The strange relationship between museum objects and the digital copies we make of them Today, it is possible to walk... View Article
Why Go To The Beach?
My past week has been spent stretched out on a beach, or otherwise walking up and down its supple sands,... View Article
Paul Klee’s Tunisia Trip
One of my favourite artists is the Swiss-German painter Paul Klee. In 1914, Klee took a two-week trip to Tunisia,... View Article
Patience is the Unsung Hero of Creativity
It is tempting to think of creativity as an explosive act, picturing Jackson Pollock prowling around his canvas, dripping paint... View Article
The Pleasure of Cities
The first cities I truly visited were those I was set free in. When I was eighteen years old, unharnessed... View Article
Why Such Odd Names? Kobo, Kindle, Nook
eReaders and their names: a short survey One of my favorite phrases is “Books do furnish a room”. Whenever I... View Article
Picasso, Primitivism, And Cultural Appropriation
When artists adopt, do they also oppress? The first time I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York I... View Article
Social Media and The Gaze
The act of gazing brings people into new relationships. The angles and meeting points of looking and seeing imply distinctions... View Article
Zen in the Art of Archery
Eugen Herrigel’s beautiful insight into Zen is also problematic. Does it still have the power to teach?
Review of “All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life” at Tate Britain
There is nothing commemorative about this remarkably diverse exhibition, which attempts to trace the activities of a number of London-based... View Article
Memory’s Work: The Art of Toba Khedoori
The appeal of Toba Khedoori’s work lies, perhaps, in the enigmatic precision with which her images are made. It lends... View Article
Why happiness can’t be strategised
One of the most profound books I read as a younger person was Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. The... View Article
Turn 40 and don’t fade away
I’ve just turned 40 years old. It’s not an enormous number, not an elephantine age. But it’s a number that... View Article