Biography of fiction by an author from South Africa

Posted on by
Reply

SOMEONE SENT ME a message on Facebook, recommending me to read “Arctic Summer”, a novel by the South African author Damon Galgut (born 1963). It was a great recommendation, and I am grateful for it. The story is about the author EM Forster (1879-1970), whose books include “A Passage to India”.

Galgut’s superbly written, well-researched, fascinating novel is a fictional biography of Forster during the period between, and including, his first two visits to India. It also mentioned Forster’s third later visit. The book is not only a biography of Forster, but also a fictional biography of the writing of “A Passage To India”: the biography of a novel. The book also explores Forster’s yearning for the physical love of men, and the frustrations he faced, many of them of his own making. And Galgut, in writing this book, also gives an insight into the difficulties that authors can face when writing fiction.

Galgut’s book reads as well as does his protagonist’s Indian novel. I read “Arctic Summer” after reading “A Passage to India”. Having read the books in this order made a lot of sense. However, if you pick up Galgut’s book first, it will most likely make you want to read “A Passage …”.

I enjoyed Galgut’s novel so much that I am keen to read some more of his work.

An artist from Sweden near London’s Smithfield meat market

Posted on by
Reply

KURT BEERS IS probably unique amongst owners of commercial art galleries in London because he was once a ‘Mountie’, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. His gallery in Little Britain (near the Smithfield meat market and the Barbican) specialises in showcasing contemporary paintings created by up-and-coming artists and those in mid-career. Often, the gallery shows the works of painters, who are not yet well-known, but deserve to become better recognised.  Until 23 May 2026, Beers has an exhibition of works by Alice Herbst.

Alice was born in Sweden in 1993. She studied art at the Stockholm School of Fine Art, and then at the Gerlesberg School of Fine Art. Her show at Beers is called “The Whispering Game”, and is a collection of paintings made between 2025 and 2026. As soon as I saw the paintings, I liked them. Excellently executed, well-composed, and intriguing, they are highly original: a breath of fresh air. Without knowing exactly what, I felt that each painting told a story. What that story was intended to be by the artist did not matter because the viewer can make up his or her interpretation of what was being portrayed.

In many of the paintings, masks can be seen, either being worn or just on their own. In a couple of paintings, faces were partially obscured. Why the masks and the hidden faces are so prevalent would make interesting subject matter for a psychologist. Another feature in Alice’s paintings are depictions of paintings within the paintings. For example, in one picture a masked woman seems to be holding a bunch of flowers. After a moment, one can see that it is not a bouquet in her hand but a board with a painting of flowers upon it. In another painting, a still life that includes a vase with flowers, the flowers appear to be a painting of flowers on a board, rather than real flowers. These types of images within images and the profusion of masks make Alice’s paintings more than pretty pictures, and give one cause to wonder.

As with all the shows we have viewed at Beers, Alice’s paintings were well-displayed on the whitewashed walls of the gallery. Though far from the large group of art galleries in Mayfair, Beers deserves regular visits.

A personal history about the south of India

Posted on by
Reply

THE COROMANDEL COAST stretches along the east side of India between the Krishna River in the north and the southern tip of the subcontinent. So, when I began reading “Coromandel” by Charles Allen (1940-2020), I was expecting to read a history of this coast and its hinterland.

The book’s subtitle is “A Personal History of South India”, and that is what it is. Although the Coromandel Coast is mentioned within the text, the book is primarily a very fascinating, well-researched and reasoned history of southern India, and how that history was influenced by events that happened north of the Narmada River, which the author took as an approximate dividing line between the northern and southern parts of the subcontinent.

I am very glad I read the book even though at first I was hoping that the author was going to concentrate on the east coast of India, rather than the whole of the south of the country. In fact, there is a great deal about the west coast of southern India, which. fascinating as it is, is not the Coromandel Coast. Despite my disappointment that Charles Allen strayed from the Coromandel Coast, about which I was hoping to read, this is an excellently written book.

A place where there are no birds

Posted on by
Reply

DURING A RECENT visit to the Tate Britain art gallery in London, we stopped to view a room that contained paintings of birds. All the paintings except one contained depictions of at least one bird. The exception, in which there was no bird to be seen, was painted by Richard Wilson (1713-1782).

The painting is called “Lake Avernus and the Island of Capri”, and was painted in about 1760. Lake Avernus is near Naples (Napoli). In Roman mythology, it was believed by to be the mouth of Hades, the hellish underworld described in the “Aeneid” by the Roman author Virgil (70 BC – 19 BC). This evil place was believed to emit fumes that killed any birds flying over it.

The name Averna is derived from the Greek word ‘aornos’, which translates as ‘without birds’. Hence the absence of birds in Wilson’s painting.

A British artist whose parents came from the Caribbean

Posted on by
Reply

THE BRITISH PAINTER Hurvin Anderson was born in Birmingham (UK) in 1965. His mother and father came to Britain from Jamaica before he was born. As a child, he carried a sketchbook with him wherever he went. He studied art first at Wimbledon College of Art, and then later at the Royal College of Art. Until 26 August 2026, there is an exhibition of his works (mainly paintings) at Tate Britain in London.

Although Hurvin was not brought up in the Caribbean, he learned a lot about the place by listening to his parents talking about the places they had left. The first room of the exhibition contains paintings he made after seeing his parents’ and their friends’ photographs. They are not copies of the photographs but they depict his impressions of what can be seen in them.

Other rooms contain paintings which he made in the Caribbean while undertaking an artist’s residency in Port of Spain in Trinidad & Tobago. In some of these pictures, he explored the complex relationships between slavery, the Caribbean’s colonial past, and modern social situations. In some of the paintings, he places his subject matter behind a painted barrier, for example a grid or fence, to emphasise the fact that often in the Carribean, some people (black or poor) were excluded from pla es where others (white or wealthy) were admitted. Although many of Hurvin’s paintings contain messages or comments about life in the Caribbean, his emphasis is on the aesthetic, rather than the politics.

One of the many pictures that caught my attention was called “Between Port Radix and Moruga II”. According to its exhibition label, it depicts a Hindu mandir (temple) in Trinidad. It shows a low building in front of which many pennants, each on its own pole, are fluttering in the wind. Tridad has a south Asian community. One of its best-known personalities was the writer VS Naipaul (1932-2018).

Near the end of the show, there is a gallery that contains four paintings that Hurvin created specially for the Tate’s exhibition. These, like all the others on show, are beautifully composed and skilfully executed. Hurvin’s portrayals of both people and nature make a visit to the exhibition extremely enjoyable.

From Goa to Europe and the early development of hypnotism

Posted on by
Reply

HERE IS A BOOK that I bought some years ago when visiting the city of Panjim in Goa, the formerly Portuguese colony, now a state of India. Written by Luis SR Vas, it is a biography of Abbé Faria, who was born in Portuguese Goa in 1756, and died in Paris (France) in 1819. There is a statue commemorating him in the centre of Panjim. A picture of this monument adorns the front cover of the book, and depicts Faria hypnotising a woman. I have seen the sculpture, and I photographed it 2018.

Faria spent most of his life away from the Indian subcontinent, in Italy, Portugal and France. Born Jose Custodio de Faria, he became a priest, and was, for a time, highly regarded in ecclesiastical and royal circles. Living in turbulent times, life did not go smoothly for him. For example in 1797, he was arrested in Marseilles, and imprisoned in the now famous Chateau d’If, Luis Vas wrote that it was Faria, who was in the mind of the author Alexandre Dumas when he included a character named Faria in his novel “The Count of Monte Cristo” (first published in 1844).

The Abbé’s chief claim to fame is that he was a pioneer of what we now call hypnosis, but he called ‘lucid sleep’. He spent many years perfecting this now well-recognised method of modifying behaviour and its use in the armoury of medical science. However, during his life, although admired by many, he was disdained and criticised by others. He discovered that subjects could only be hypnotised if they were willing to be susceptible. This was in contrast to his rival, Anton Mesmer, who believed that states of hypnosis were achieved by altering the subject’s magnetic field: animal magnetism. Faria was one of the first to question Mesmer’s theory. Faria died a poor man, but it was only many decades later that reputable scientists realised that what he had done was sound, rather than quackery.

The book by Vas is not only biographical, but also full of the history of the times through which Faria lived, and of the various countries where he worked and resided. The book ends with a brief summary of the course of the history of hypnosis after Faria’s death. Probably difficult to obtain outside of Panjim, where it was published, the book provided a fascinating insight into a subject, hypnosis, about which I have rarely considered in the past.

Artists and architecture at a gallery in south London

Posted on by
Reply

ARCHITECTURE, GOOD OR BAD, is one of the arts, and a practical one at that. Until 12 April 2026, the South London Gallery (part of the former Camberwell School of Art) is holding an exhibition of artworks created because of the artists’ reaction to architecture, real and imagined. Theire interpretations include references to intact buildings, as well as ruins and monuments.

By William Braithwaite

The works I liked best in the exhibition were a series of vertical sculptures made by William Braithwaite using timber and concrete. In his personal website (www.williambraithwaite.com/) he explained:

“I aim to create a dialogue between the two disciplines, considering how they inform and complement each other … While my work may reference architectural forms, it remains rooted in visual and conceptual exploration rather than function. The materials, scale, and context of my sculptures serve as tools to examine the aesthetic and spatial qualities of architecture.”

And this he does very effectively as can be seen when viewing the works on display at the South London Gallery. The sculptures are concrete pillars, square in cross-section, with staircases carved in the concrete of the pillars. These steps spiral up the pillars, and above each flight of steps, one can see what one imagines to be the undersides of other flights.

The other artworks on display were interesting but not as arresting as the sculptures by Braithwaite. Of these, I liked a trompe-l’oeil by Ally Fallon, and a larger than life set of sewing tools (needles, pins, and safety pin), whose connection with architecture was not obvious to me.

There are only a couple of days left before this exhibition ends, and I am glad I was able to see it.  Exhibitions held at the South London Gallery rarely, if ever, disappoint. So, if you have missed the one described above, try to see whatever they show in the future (see: www.southlondongallery.org/).

The art of war at a museum in south London

Posted on by
Reply

ALTHOUGH LONDON’S IMPERIAL War Museum contains a rich collection of objects related to warfare, it also has a fine art gallery in which there are many paintings inspired by, and recording, wars from WW1 onwards. The artworks, mostly paintings, are to be found in the rooms in the Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries on the museum’s third floor.

“Gassed” by John Singer Sargent

The paintings and other artworks are mostly by artists, who are now well-known, such as, to mention only a few: Joan Miro, Paul Nash, Eileen Agar, Laura Knight, Percy Wyndham-Lewis, John Piper, Eric Ravilious, John Singer Sargent, David Bomberg, and Steve McQueen. Others are by less well-known artists, and many of them have created images inspired by outbreaks of warfare that have occurred since the end of WW2. One of these, made by Steve McQueen, is a collection of postage stamps with faces of military personnel who died during the relatively recent Iraq conflict. These postage stamps, all of which bear a soldier’s portrait and the head of Queen Elizabeth II, are kept in a special wooden cabinet with sliding panels that can be pulled out to see the stamps.  Like all the other artworks, this is both dramatic and moving. And seeing them during a period of warfare in the Middle East made them seem even more poignant.

There are several paintings by artists who joined British Colonial Artists Scheme, which encouraged ‘native-born’ artists to depict aspects of activities connected with warfare in the colonies. One of these artists was an African called Katongole. Another artist of interest is an Iraqi refugee called Walid Siti, who was born in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1984, and his etching was inspired by warfare.

Of all the wonderful paintings on display, two particularly attracted my attention. One showing Indian soldiers, who were recovering from injuries during WW1, lying in beds under a large, amazingly decorative dome in Brighton Pavilion, This was painted by Douglas Fox-Pitt in 1919. The other, which is the biggest picture in the galleries, is by John Singer Sargent. Called “Gassed”, it shows a long line of blindfolded soldiers, injured by poisonous gas, being led by an officer wearing a white overcoat. As they walk along, they are passing the corpses of their fellow soldiers.

The artworks in the Blavatnik Galleries at the Imperial War Museum easily rival what can be seen in the permanent collection of Tate Modern, and are a ‘must-see’ for anyone who has an interest in twentieth century artists, especially those who worked in Britain.