On art.

The St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery in Lymington always boxes above its weight and its current show, "Home Lad Home, the War Horse story" is no exception. It isn't an enormous display, but it is very moving on several counts, and not least its beauty and - more surprisingly - its positivity. This show and the fine town which houses the gallery make a wonderful away-day. Read more...

Jonathan Meades is a vital figure, a sort of a Christopher Hitchens for architecture, with a dash of Ian Nairn, but considerable wallops of Suggsy, and a undertone of some late 18th Century person (wonderful to think it might be JM's admired Burke himself). I very much approve his appreciation of Brutalism, though I would go further and wider.... Read more...

I am fond of the Selsey "Wave" and its three-dimensional homage to the great 19th Century print by Hokusai... Read more...

The John Craxton show at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is very lovely, and much more so than I dared expect. This is Ne0-romanticism, or the English Romantic, at its giddy, evocative best. (It is very decently reviewed by Robin Blake in the FT.) It jived surprisingly with the London visit of Stanley Spencer paintings from the Sandham Memorial Chapel. (These are well-reviewed by Adrian Hamilton in the Independent.) Read more...

It was off to the V&A Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700 - 1900 (ends 19 January 2014)  and to the Fitzwilliam, Cambridge for The night of longing: Love and desire in Japanese prints (12 January, 2014). Yes, I was stupid enough to miss the Japanese Shunga show in the British Museum's Rooms 90/91, the very place which set me off on this quest... Read more...

I have been thinking about why I have found most comics, graphic novels and animated films kind of not what I was after, and what I would love to see - but could only summon-forth from the mind and hand of someone else... Read more...

The Association of Illustrators Awards 2013 exhibition tour features some of the most exciting artistic material I've seen this year. Read more...

I was oddly touched by Tomorrow.  Its conceit was believable in both character and staging, and precisely because they are preposterous. Its central figure Norman Swann, was posited as probably queer and possibly a non-practising pederast; as glamorous, sad, modernist and - yes - socialist. Read more...

I admire all things Shawcross (William, his works, wives and offspring) and I went to see his son Conrad Shawcross's new time piece at the Roundhouse full of hope. With 24 iron pillars in a circular brick masterpiece, what could go wrong when a talented sculptor applied himself to making a clock in that splendid gloom? Read more...

London and the south (allowing Pembrokeshire as southern) have been putting on a fabulous array of shows which specially make you glad to be British, and to have inherited a tradition which runs back to Samuel Palmer and John Constable (watercolours, not oils, for my taste) but has left us with very feeling and talented work, especially from the mid-20th Century.... Read more...