A retrospective of the vibrant paintings of Maro Gorky, to celebrate her 80th birthday, has just opened at Long & Ryle, round the corner on John Islip Street. In the show’s catalogue, Cressida Connolly writes: ‘any room would sing with one of her paintings on the wall.’ Well here are 20 or so of her exuberant creations in a single – rather intimate – gallery space: make that a joyful chorus.

The oil painter David Storey brings forgotten people’s memories to life, and makes them universal.

He trawls car boot sales and flea markets for old family photo albums, and uses selected images - often of individuals or family groups posing rather awkwardly for a loved-one’s holiday snap - as the starting point of his process. He works these images into miniature portraits, using egg tempera and oil on wood, attempting to ‘unlock the poetry from within’.

Gillian Wearing is, of course, best known for her conceptual videos and photographs and, more recently, her sculptures. But during lockdown the Turner Prize-winning artist also turned – like other YBAs before her – to painting. And, in particular, to painting portraits.

RJ Kitaj was taught drawing by Percy Horton, who was taught by Walter Sickert, who was taught by Edgar Degas. Is it fanciful to see the connection between the French master and the American artist?

Kitaj, who spent his formative years in England, had a big influence on British pop art, and never stopped experimenting with style, form and medium, but he was, above all, an exceptional draftsman: the critic Robert Hughes called him ‘better than almost anyone else’.

In 2018 the Charleston Trust opened a gallery in the grounds to exhibit artists who, in one way or another, were connected to Charleston. Hylton Nel, whose work is displayed in the adjacent South Gallery, could also be described as a ceramicist, though he prefers to use the term ‘artist-potter’. He makes plates in his studio in South Africa, and uses them as a medium for expression, painting onto them figures, patterns and words. This is Grant and Bell territory, of course…

Sculptural ceramicist Halima Cassell admits she had never heard of the Watts Gallery Artists’ Village, near Guildford in Surrey, before she was invited to become the first contemporary artist to exhibit there since its restoration in 2011. But as soon as she entered the Watts Cemetery Chapel, she fell in love with the eclectically styled terracotta building, realising that the artistic vision of Mary Watts, who oversaw its exterior and interior design 125 years ago, bore uncanny similarities to her own.

‘That man is the greatest painter in watercolours of our time’. So wrote the artist Augustus John, of Arthur Henry Knighton-Hammond, in a review of an exhibition of his work in Menton, on the French Riviera, in 1926.

Alex Leith is with Roberta Travers, of Piano Nobile, in front of the haunting self-portrait of Jean Cooke, completed in 1954, which opens the gallery’s new show about the painter, Seascapes and Chalk Caves.

John Piper was an artistic polymath, able to shift, seemingly effortlessly, from style to style, genre to genre, medium to medium. He is perhaps most famous today for his delicate, elegant, rather brooding landscapes, particularly those depicting the ruins of churches in the English countryside. But he also worked in the fields of abstract art, collage, book illustration…

Is it my imagination, or can you still smell the oil paint?

The Scottish-born artist Peter Doig moved back to England in 2021 after 20 years living in Trinidad, and this fine exhibition of twelve large canvases represents work that he has since created – or in most cases finished off – in his East London home-cum-studio.

The National Portrait Gallery has announced its 2023/24 programme, commencing this June, after a two-year closure for the largest redevelopment in its history. 

The news last summer that the 2023 Turner Prize had been awarded to Towner Eastbourne was met with surprise in certain quarters. Eastbourne? The Turner Prize? The Sussex seaside town was best known to the greater public, after all, as a genteel resort favoured by the older generation, and nicknamed ‘God’s Waiting Room’.

Margaret Thatcher famously called him ‘That man who paints those dreadful pictures’ and Francis Bacon’s work, always full of existential anguish, certainly divided critics throughout his five-decade career, his shocking images simultaneously intriguing and repulsing his viewers.

When the abstract painter Trevor Bell died in 2017, many mourned the passing of ‘the last of the St Ives Modernists’.

Until March 27 Willoughby Gerrish is holding a show of Gerald Laing’s work at Thirsk Sculpture Garden in Yorkshire.

‘Alberto painted as an Italian operatic tenor sings, that is with a passionate theatricality and always con brio.’ So wrote artist and lecturer David McClure, about his compatriot and near-contemporary Alberto Morrocco, one of the leading figures of 20th-century Scottish art.

The latest exhibition at Candida Stevens’ eponymous Chichester gallery, Water & Ways, is subtitled ‘an exhibition of artworks inspired by Sussex, post war and contemporary’. It acts as an interesting counterpoint to the big autumn show at Pallant House Gallery, just down the road, entitled Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood and Water (see ‘Bill Brandt’s geological nudes’, below).

One day Stanley Donwood will be written about without mention of the fact that he has been responsible for all Radiohead’s album-cover artwork since they started. Although not in this piece. Not yet.

Before his death, in 1974, the post-impressionist landscape painter Edward Seago wrote in his will that one third of the paintings stored in his studio in Norwich should be destroyed. Luckily for the world, Seago was a prolific artist, and around 19,000 watercolours and 300 oil paintings remain.

Bill Brandt escaped from Germany in the 30s and made his name as a photographer chronicling the customs of his adopted compatriots in books such as The English at Home (1936) and articles in illustrated magazines such as Lilliput and Picture Post.