According to Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler was ‘never dull, his brilliant wit, his caustic satire and his amusing epigrams made his views on art as delightful as they were misleading, and as fascinating as they were unsound.’ Wilde and Whistler were notorious dandies of Victorian London and vied with each other for the position of preeminent wit and vainest man of the era. They were famous friends until Wilde’s growing reputation threatened to knock Whistler, who was tw

JMW Turner and John Constable were contemporaries and artistic rivals at Royal Academy exhibitions. Rivals and Originals at Tate Britain offers a chance to see their paintings side by side and trace their diverging approaches to landscape. Initially similar, their work became radically different from each other. Turner and Constable were both accomplished watercolourists. The youthful Turner’s watercolour paintings were highly detailed topographical views that gave no hint

A visit to the William Nicholson exhibition at Pallant House Gallery was a great way to brighten up a cold January day. I had seen Nicholson's Silver Casket and Red Leather Basket at a previous exhibition and I knew he was the father of Ben Nicholson, who had been one of the pioneers of British abstract art. I thought that was the extent of my knowledge but stepping into the first room of this gorgeous exhibition, I recognised many of the prints on display, especially the one

Heene Terrace was built in 1865, along with Heene Hotel (now the Burlington), as the first part of the development of West Worthing. At that time, the western boundary of the main town was at the Old Coastguard House, and the village of Heene was beyond, with open fields between. There was a collection of cottages at Little Heene, on the site of today’s Thorn Road and Brunswick Road, which the town officials regarded as hovels inhabited by loafers and smugglers. The new West

Petworth is a quaint market town in the heart of the South Downs National Park. I spent a couple of days there in June and enjoyed the comforts of a modernised Victorian photographer’s studio, above an art gallery, on a picturesque car-free road called Lombard Street. The magnificent Petworth Estate was a stone’s throw away but I only had time for a short stroll among some of the park’s enormous ancient trees. Georgian Elegance Goes Pop My first destination was in the opposit

I launched my art career with a solo exhibition at Montague Gallery in the summer of 2025, with a series of paintings inspired by Worthing beach at low tide, plus photographs recording the erosion of wooden sea defences. The paintings are sandscapes rather than seascapes as the focus is the expanse of sand revealed with the tide goes out completely. Seaside Jolly Reaching the age of 66 was a major turning point for me. I was disappointed in myself for not creating the artis

I've done a lot of life drawing over the years at a variety of places, from scruffy art college classrooms at Chealsea and Camberwell to an amazing loft studio in Bow. I recently went to the Cellar Arts Club in Worthing and was pleased to discover I could still draw. I had a thrilling experience at a life drawing class in the summer of 2011. At that time, I was working in London and one afternoon, I got a call from my artist friend Chrissie, saying I was in for a surprise if

I was really looking forward to the National Gallery’s latest blockbuster exhibition Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers. The gallery website claimed I would be ‘blown away by Van Gogh’s most spectacular paintings in this once-in-a-century exhibition’ and encouraged me to ‘see the work up-close’. Unfortunately, I was blown away by the hordes of people in front of every piece in the exhibition and I barely achieved a distant or partial view. This was the worst exhibition experience I’v

The Courtauld Gallery exhibition Monet and London: Views of the Thames brings together a group of paintings that were first exhibited in Paris 120 years ago. Monet painted his Thames series during visits to London in 1899, 1900 and 1901, while staying at the Savoy Hotel, from where he could look out on the river and surrounding architecture, shrouded in the notorious London fog. Monet visited during the winter, when the fog produced by the city’s heavy industry was at its mos

Clapham Wood is a place I've visited many times in the spring, when the whole place is covered in bluebells. I remember going there with my mum when I was a child and she always took a trowel to dig up primroses and a trug to carry them home. That's probably illegal now. The wood has gained a reputation for ghostly apparitions, Satanic rituals, UFO sightings and disappearing animals. There are also links to a series of murders in the 1970s and one of the victims was a retired

This Pallant House Gallery exhibition, called The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain, starts with Dutch paintings from the 17th century, when still life was regarded as the lowest genre in art. Representations of fruit and flowers – usually hyper-realistic and giving artists an opportunity to show off their skills – highlight the brevity of life and reminded us that ripe fruits and beautiful blooms will die and decay, just as we will. The exhibition traces the journey of

Low tide reveals big ragged flints, smooth little pebbles, lumps of chalk, sculptural hag stones and worm casts, all strewn across the ridges and rivulets in the wet sand. Taking close-up shots allowed me to create pleasing arrangements, the possibilities were endless and I got a bit carried away. Tomorrow, after two tides have come and gone, everything will have shifted and nothing will be exactly the same.

I love wandering around historic houses and Charleston, near Lewes in East Sussex, is a particularly delightful place to visit, being the former home of two Bloomsbury artists who transformed a tumbledown farmhouse into an avant-garde work of art. Vanessa Bell moved into the 16th-century farmhouse in 1916 with her young sons, Julian and Quentin. As well as a cook, a housemaid and a nanny, she brought her lover Duncan Grant, who brought his dog Henry and his lover David Garnet

I consider the sea off Worthing as my little bit of the English Channel. Sometimes it's a clear and beautiful aqua-green colour, sometimes deep blue and sometimes it looks like sludge. It all depends on the weather, tides and light, which constantly change. Underneath the waves is a hidden world of marine wildlife, a kelp forest and a reef of chalky rocks called the Worthing Lumps.

Surprising, magical and spectacular are the best words to use when describing the Collector Earl’s Garden at Arundel Castle. As a Sussex native, I’ve visited the magnificent fairytale castle numerous times over the years and always found it a thrilling place to be, and the Collector Earl’s Garden adds a further dimension to the ancestral home of the Dukes of Norfolk. The Collector Earl was Thomas Howard (1585-1646) 14th Earl of Arundel, 4th Earl of Surrey and 1st Earl of Norf

This exhibition at Tate Britain explores the importance of costume in John Singer Sargent’s portraits of members of high society in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The claim is that he carefully stage managed his sitters’ clothing in order to reveal personality and identity but I don’t think these portraits reveal much about the sitters’ individual identity. I’m sure all portrait painters make decisions about what sitters wear, how they are posed, what the lighting is like,

I love visiting gardens and there are some places not too far from Worthing where you can enjoy amazing examples of garden design, beautiful flowers and the wildlife that such places attract: the Sussex Prairie Garden near Henfield, Highdown, the Collector Earl's garden at Arundel Castle, Charleston Farmhouse and Sissinghurst.

I recently visited the marvellous Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to see the retrospective exhibition of John Craxton, called A Modern Odyssey. The show traces his career from British Neo-Romanticism to a distinctive kind of Modernism, embracing a variety of influences from Picasso to Pop Art. The exhibition starts with work made by Craxton in the early 1940s – images of melancholic poets in gloomy landscapes that hark back nostalgically to a long-lost English idyll – and

I left my home town to study for a degree in Art History at Middlesex University, at the Trent Park campus just north of High Barnet. After graduating, I lived in various places in north London: New Barnet, Muswell Hill, Harringay and Highgate. Then I went north west to Willesden Green and west to Ealing before moving south of the river: Stockwell, Herne Hill, Peckham and finally East Dulwich. There was a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth in Dulwich Park: Two Forms (Divided Circl

In December 2009 I spent some time in Talywern, a remote hamlet in Mid Wales. The journey from London was long, with multiple changes of trains, and I got stuck for ages at Shrewsbury because the train from Aberystwyth was delayed due to bad weather. The journey took all day but it was a worthwhile trip: there was snow everywhere and I felt like I'd stepped into Narnia.