The Scottish artist Charles Hodge Mackie RSA RSW, the founding president of the Scottish Society of Artists, had a fruitful love affair with Venice, and made several extended visits to the ‘La Serenissima’ between 1908 and 1914, creating many works which significantly enhanced his reputation. You can admire his work at the Fine Art Society’s latest exhibition, titled Twentieth Century, at their London gallery.

Happy birthday to the Redfern Gallery, who are celebrating their 100th anniversary with two consecutive centenary exhibitions of paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures. The first is currently on show in their Cork Street space, where the gallery has been based since 1936 (having moved from Redfern House in Old Bond Street, hence the name).

Is this muscular angel falling, floating, or dancing? Perhaps all three at once. The colourful pink-winged creature is the creation of Amy Beager, and is typical of her romantic, melodramatic, enchanting work, which transforms neo-classical figures into modern-day deities, in dayglo tones. It is titled Bobbidi, referencing The Magic Song from Cinderella, inferring a spell has been cast: rest assured we are not moving in the material world. Beager entered the piece for the Ingram Prize 2022 (for contemporary UK artists), and was chosen as one of the four winners. As a result Bobbidi has been acquired by the Ingram Collection, and is on show at their latest exhibition.

I’m pretty sure that when Lisa Ivory lay awake at night as a young child, she was convinced that a monster lay drooling under her bed. Such creatures reappear in all her oil paintings: dark, shaggy beasts of vaguely humanoid form.

You can currently see the artist’s latest series of paintings at Saatchi Gallery, in the show Beyond the Gaze – Reclaiming the Landscape, curated by Zavier Ellis. The exhibition explores landscape painting through a contemporary female gaze.

The National Portrait Gallery’s 2020 exhibition of portraits painted (and otherwise created) by David Hockney closed after just 22 days, due to governmental Covid restrictions. Hockney has since continued to invite sitters to his Normandy studio – including pop singer Harry Styles, pictured above – and 33 of these will be included in a new version of the exhibition, Drawing from Life, to be displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in November. Tickets have gone on sale this week…

There’s double reason to go to the National Gallery this week, with one stunning temporary exhibition just opened, and another set to close.

First up, Crivelli’s Garden, the monumental mural created thirty years ago by the late Paula Rego. Rego’s work stretches ten metres across and depicts female characters from the Bible, the Golden Legend (a medieval compilation of the lives of the saints) and other traditional folklore sources, reimagined through Rego’s very female gaze.

‘I can’t tell you how delicious this country is,’ wrote a 23-year-old John Craxton to his friend Elsie ‘EQ’ Nicholson, from Athens, on May 20, 1946. ‘…the lovely hot sun all day & at night tavernas: hot prawns in olive oil & great wine & the soft sweet smell of Greek pine trees. I shall never come home. How can I?’.

A strange thing happened at the private view of Long & Ryle’s solo exhibition of the paintings of Kate Montgomery, in Pimlico on Wednesday evening (June 29th). The wine was flowing, and there was a convivial atmosphere, as the Brighton-based artist, up for the evening, held court. But, in any photographs taken of the party, there won’t have been many faces in shot: just lots of backs of heads. I’ve never been to an art opening at which so many people spent so long looking at the art.

Donald McGill… meet Roy Lichtenstein. Deborah Azzopardi paints sexy, saucy, cartoonish scenes in bright colours on large canvases.

Women pull their tops over their heads; louchely lean their long stiletto-tipped legs out of convertible sports cars, and put their fingers in front of their full lips, as if to whisper ‘Shhhh! Let’s keep this our little secret.’

On February 9th, 1965, The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, in front of a record live TV audience of 73 million Americans, starting their set with All My Loving, and ending it with She Loves You. Beatlemania had crossed the Atlantic.

If there’s one place where mankind can claim victory in the struggle to tame and colonise nature, it’s got to be the Cotswolds. Which is probably why the ‘Beast of Burford’ – a black panther supposedly on the prowl in Oxfordshire – has become such a popular local legend. The painter John Lendis has made the Cotswolds his home, after spells abroad and is fond of inhabiting his landscapes of the area with repeated motifs: of foxes, angels and Landrover Defenders.  

How long do you need to take in the 1,613 works in this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, co-ordinated by the genial octogenarian water-colourist David Remfry?

A big welcome to the Fine Art Society, exhibiting for the first time at the British Art Fair this Autumn.

One can safely assume that Laura Knight’s Baiting Lines, Staithes (c1900) was not painted on a Sunday.

In 1923 the author David ‘Bunny’ Garnett introduced Stephen Tomlin to the Bloomsbury group. Tomlin, nicknamed ‘Tommy’, was a 22-year-old sculptor: intelligent, good looking and very, very charming. He was also bisexual and incurably promiscuous, hence the title of this exhibition at Philip Mould’s Pall Mall gallery (borrowed from a recent biography by Michael Bloch and Susan Fox, which has enjoyed a republication to coincide with the show).

Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin, Philip Mould & Company, until August 11.

Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson’s rehang of Tate Britain, revealed to the public on May 23, has been much derided in the press. The Guardian called it ‘vacuous, worthy and dull’; the FT suggested a ‘hectoring’ and ‘self-righteous’ tone to the labelling. But there are, to be fair, many positives to come out of it, and one is that the British pop artist Richard Hamilton has been given his own room.

To use the parlance of the time, the Welsh artist Ceri Richards (1903-1971) ‘had a good war’, though it didn’t start off terribly well.

Jonathan Clark Fine Art Gallery represent Richards’ estate, and studies made in situ in the foundry are displayed in their current exhibition, hence the ‘Furnaces’ in its title. The ‘Feathers’ refers to the garments worn by the costermonger Pearly Kings and Queens, who had inspired the artist when he was living in London: wartime sketches of these flamboyant figures, also on show.

Emily Young, ‘Britain’s greatest living land sculptor’ (FT), talks about having a friendship, even a marriage, with every bit of stone she works with, whether that’s Onyx or Speleothem, or Jaisalmer, or Quartzite, or Calacatta, or Lapis or Alabaster.

Two interconnected shows opened at Pallant House Gallery on May 13, both in their different way concerned with what might be described as ‘the female gaze’.

Osborne Samuel have named their latest exhibition of the work of Keith Vaughan – their fifth since 2007 – Image and Anxiety.

The Mayfair gallery has gathered over 80 works from major private collections, and paintings from their own inventory, including all eight of his lithographs, and the show – which enjoyed a crowded private view on May 10 – is illustrated with two cabinets full of Vaughan’s notebooks, letters, photographs and journals.