John-Paul Stonard

John-Paul Stonard’s Creation, a history of art since ancient times, was published in 2021. He is writing a book about images of animals.

In the Studio: Howard Hodgkin

John-Paul Stonard, 23 January 2014

Howard Hodgkin has finished a new painting. It is called Summer Rain, and is painted with oils on a framed wooden panel, about two metres in length and just over one metre high. At the centre a pinkish-brown form like a cool fireball rises vividly against a background of luxuriant green – foliage perhaps, or even palm trees, which appear often in Hodgkin’s pictures. A band of...

At the Guggenheim: Christopher Wool

John-Paul Stonard, 19 December 2013

The American artist Christopher Wool’s large abstract paintings are often beautiful, but they are so emptied of content that it is at first hard to know what to make of them. For the first ten years or so after he came to attention in the mid-1980s, he was considered an artist’s artist: he didn’t have a large public following or much of an international reputation. All this...

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