Obtaining a desired image can be a long exercise in trial and error.
OpenAI
Visual artists draw from visual references, not words, as they imagine their work. So when language is in the driver’s seat of making art, it erects a barrier between the artist and the canvas.
Leonora Carrington at home in Mexico (2000).
Daniel Aguilar/Reuters/Alamy Stock Photo
Surreal Spaces paints a portrait of fragility and strength, passion and determination.
Shutterstock
Living in cities filled with tags may make us feel less safe. But tags don’t mean crime and gangs. The real reasons people tag buildings and bridges are to show off and create community.
Self portrait with a letter.
Musée Rodin / Pallant House Gallery
Gwen John was very much her own woman and followed her own artistic instincts, producing small, intimate, idiosyncratic paintings that resonate.
Warlpiri Dictionary contributors.
Photo: Jeff Bruer, PAW Media, for Aboriginal Studies Press/AIATSIS
The Warlpiri Dictionary has been 60 years in the making – and it’s shortlisted for the 2023 Australian Book Industry Awards, a rarity for a dictionary.
Steven Yeun as Danny and Ali Wong as Amy in Beef.
Courtesy of Netflix
Through collector Jordan’s fetishistic interest in Asian women, Beef shows the troubling link between collecting artefacts and sexual control.
Installation view of Magic in this Country: Hepworth, Moore and the Land.
Courtesy of The Hepworth Wakefield
Growing up in Yorkshire gave Hepworth and Moore outsider viewpoints on the art world.
Who’s in control?
John Lund/Stone via Getty Images
AI is poised to reshape parts of US culture and society. Have tech developments raced ahead of our ability to understand the consequences?
Shortlisted artist Barbara Walker’s work explores issues of racial identity and interrogates Britain’s past.
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London
From the shock tactics of 90s artists starved of public funding to a pivot towards an art based in community and activism today.
As of 2022 there were 3,216 women prisoners in the UK.
Islandstock/Alamy Stock Photo
The artworks created by women in prison brought us greater understanding of their often complex and traumatic experiences
A memorial to Grenfell victims in west London.
Globetrotters/Shutterstock
If there were any doubts about the destruction caused by the fire on 14th June 2017, then Steve McQueen’s film reveals its true desolation.
‘Les Demoiselles d'Avignon’, by Pablo Picasso, 1907.
MoMA / Wikimedia Commons
In various sketches and pencil sketches that Picasso made during his formative years, the most important plastic, perceptive, communicative and expressive revolution of the 20th century was being foreshadowed with absolute clarity: Cubism.
A letter from van Gogh to his brother Theo featuring a sketch for his painting The Sower.
Van Gogh Museum
His letters reveal a man straining under pressure from his parents to help better their family name.
Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum.
Shutterstock
An art historian explains how Vincent van Gogh went from an unknown painter to one of the world’s most expensive artists.
Wheatfield with Crows by Vincent van Gogh (1890).
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam / Vincent van Gogh Foundation
Museums have pushed the narrative of Vincent van Gogh as a ‘tortured genius’ for decades, but in its 50th year the Van Gogh Museum is questioning this approach.
Villa Aurora in Rome, which houses works by Caravaggio and Guercino, is up for sale.
Vincenzo Pinto/AFP via Getty Images
What will happen to this villa and its unique collection of 16th- and 17th-century ceiling paintings?
Sasha Huber film still from Rentyhorn.
Courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma
Sasha Huber’s work often involves renaming colonial landmarks, including a mountain in Switzerland.
The 2013 David Bowie Is exhibition at the V&A, in London.
REUTERS/Alamy
The artist’s fabled archive spans his entire career, showcasing his playful curiosity, his need for beauty and his respect for style.
The Provinces of Spain: Castile, by Sorolla, (1912-13).
The Hispanic Society of America, New York/Royal Academy
During the medieval and early modern era, the Iberian Peninsula was an extraordinary cultural melting pot.
Man With a Tankard, by Frans van Mieris the Younger (1739).
The Fitzwilliam Museum
Historically, baldness was treated with neutrality, as a regular part of daily life. Ancient Egyptians had different balding hairstyles