Wendy Gray

Teacher by trade; art lover by choice. Like all manner of artists and movements but somehow always end up back in 1910!

Stories By Wendy Gray

Art State of Mind

All the Fun of the Fair: Carousels, Roundabouts, and Merry-Go-Rounds in Art
By Wendy GrayJuly 16, 2021
Carousels, roundabouts, and Merry-Go-Rounds have a long history documented in art, stemming back to the time of the crusades. It was used as a method of training for combat, with riders galloping in circles throwing balls...
Bodies And Erotic Art

Oh, I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside: Bathing in Art
By Wendy GrayJuly 9, 2021
With the summer holidays upon us, it seems appropriate to take a small tour through depictions of leisure bathing in art. The package holiday signalled the start of the concept of going away for a break,...
20th century

The Influence of the Ford River Rouge Complex: Charles Sheeler and Michael Kenna
By Wendy GrayJune 11, 2021
How is it possible that a 1000 acre industrial site in Dearborn, Michigan, with ninety three buildings that include blast furnaces, mills, a glass plant, a power plant, an assembly line, one hundred miles of railroad...
19th Century

The Divine Sarah: Sarah Bernhardt, The First Artist Superstar
By Wendy GrayMay 18, 2021
While we are all familiar with celebrity culture and can recognize all of the Kardashians by their silhouettes, the idea of ‘celebrity’ is not a new one. In the 19th century, a notorious French actress, who became...
20th century

Kyffin Williams and the Welsh Landscape
By Wendy GrayApril 15, 2021
The Welsh landscapes have inspired artists, poets, and writers for generations. But, for one 20th century artist, they were more than just a subject for the canvas, they were a metaphor for melancholic isolation, for power,...
19th Century

Psychological Truth on the Verge of Modernity: Symbolism in Victorian Art
By Wendy GrayMarch 31, 2021
Symbolism in the late 19th century came out of the romantic movement and explored the meanings of forms, lines, shapes, and color. It drew on literary genres such as mythology and subjects such as dreams and...
Surrealism

Violet Oakley: A Grand Vision by a Female Muralist
By Wendy GrayMarch 4, 2021
1906, Philadelphia, USA, a historic moment in art was unfolding in the Pennsylvania Capitol Building. A series of murals depicting The Founding of the State of Liberty Spiritual were being installed in the Governor’s Reception Room...
Renaissance

Pieter Bruegel: Hunters in the Snow. Hidden Stories and Meanings
By Wendy GrayJanuary 25, 2021
In the ‘Bruegel Room’ in Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, twelve paintings hang in the space. They cover the final ten year period of the life of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. One painting, in particular, takes us...
Surrealism

Lee Miller And Surrealism In Britain
By Wendy GrayAugust 7, 2018
In the delightfully quirky Hepworth Wakefield, in West Yorkshire, is a quiet exhibition that packs a whole range of mad surrealism in three galleries. What was particularly exciting about this was the fact that the lead...
Museums And Exhibitions

Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One
By Wendy GrayJuly 11, 2018
When you walk into the first room of any exhibition, there is an involuntary holding of the breath as it can often be a make or break moment. Walk into the first room of Tate Britain’s...