Blue and Green Music by Georgia O’Keeffe — It can sometimes be difficult at first to get a grip on an abstract painting. Abstractions make their presence known through colours and shapes, through a type of gestural theatre, a dance, a body language. Yet without definite symbolism to pin meaning to, paintings like this can be perplexing objects…

People and places captured brilliantly — Art history often focusses on a small selection of well known names. Yet there are thousands of other artists that deserve our attention just as much. So here are four very different artists whose work you may not know and who are worth discovering more about. Agnes Goodsir Agnes Noyes Goodsir was…

Edward Hopper’s perfectly painted dilemma, yet I cannot say what it is exactly — For a few years now, I’ve had a postcard of this painting tacked to my study wall. It’s called Pennsylvania coal town and it was made by Edward Hopper in 1947. Whenever I stop my work and look up at this painting, I can’t help but feel that Hopper painted…

Or do beauty and taste have a history? — Every discipline has to justify itself. When it comes to art, is its value determined by the wider culture — and therefore subject to constant change and revision? Or is there an intrinsic value to art, irrespective of time and place? The appreciation and study of art has always come…

Loving depiction or austere judgement? — You have to wonder what James Whistler’s mother thought of her son’s portrait of her. In this famous painting, we see a woman sitting alongside a wall, her hands clutching a lace handkerchief. On her face she wears an expression of interminable patience. …

Joseph Wright’s ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump’ — The first thing that draws my eye in this remarkable painting, made in 1768 by the British artist Joseph Wright, is the expression of the scientist — or the “natural philosopher” as he would have been called at the time.

When Love Conquers War — Sometimes art can teach us the most fundamental of lessons. The painting above shows Venus, the goddess of love and fertility. Next to her is Mars, the god of war. When read as an allegory, the message is of his aggressive nature subdued by her grace. …

And why it matters to say names correctly — How important are names? Or more to the point, how important is our ability to pronounce them correctly? For me, learning to get my tongue around the pronunciation of an artist’s name has made all the difference. Let me give an example… Anybody who has been to the Musée d’Orsay…

Hidden symbols in the Brera Madonna by Piero della Francesca — What is immediately gripping about the Brera Madonna, painted by Piero della Francesca in around 1474, is the elegant sense of space the artist has created. The illusion is of an architectural apse, a small chapel with columns on either side and capped by an archway. The light is crisp…