Artists' Letters: Leonardo da Vinci to David Hockney

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No one captures New York quite like Bill Jacklin RA, who moved to the Big Apple in the 1980s and never looked back. I wish there was no such thing as painting, as I can copy nature without the slightest wish to paint the beauty that I see’. The Falling Titan depicts the doomed attempt of an earthbound giant to reach Olympus and overthrow Zeus by climbing up a pile of great boulders, only to be crushed by those very stones.

Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, David Beckham, Madonna, Barack Obama, Angelina Jolie, Jack Nicholson, and Audrey Hepburn are just some of the celebrities featured in Ralph Ueltzhoeffer’s typography portraits. Their letters combined frankness with rhetorical pleading and contained their own press releases, studio invitations, and responses to criticism and were often intended for public consumption if used in critics’ reviews. With an exhibition of paintings by John Singer Sargent at the National Portrait Gallery, we take a look at one of this Royal Academician’s most famous works. Some were acquired as teaching materials for the RA Schools, or simply to inspire the next generation of artists.He is also interested in the duality of English words and has created several foam sculptures based on this idea. Brown complained that several papers, including the Athenaeum, refused to mention his murals until they were completed, revealing ‘the crass ignorance in matters of the art of the great political papers’ and failing to understand how long these murals take and thus how such labor deprived Brown of needed publicity.

Ever since the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, we’ve been collecting artworks, books and artistic materials.Artists had to soften rhetorical language out of their own concern to maintain ties with critics who were conduits to the art market.

However, the principle is simple: it’s a specialized blend of letter forms designed for a single use and intent rather than making use of previously created letters as components, just like typography. With a new show at White Cube Bermondsey, the artistic duo tell us eight things about their lives, art, fame, bigots, liberals, Brexit, and their favourite East End Turkish restaurant. AOI award winner Peter Strain created this stunning typography poster as part of a series commissioned by Pottermore. Inspired by our ‘Renaissance Impressions’ exhibition, Stephen Chambers RA decided to create his own chiaroscuro woodcut.This month sees the opening of the first retrospective of Bill Jacklin RA’s graphic work, tracing his career from his student days at Walthamstow School of Art in the early 1960s to his latest monotypes, created at the beginning of this year. You’ll also find bigger images and these are available to download wherever possible on a Creative Commons licence.

This goes beyond being a simple or random arrangement of letters—it’s an art that helps brands make a statement. These topics were treated in the press as information necessary to interpret and appreciate artworks.

All of these concerns, despite the tensions among them, coalesce in their letters to patrons and critics. Working from her garden studio in Sussex, painter Olwyn Bowey RA has tenaciously pursued her interest in the natural world over many decades, and the results are continuing to bear fruit. She also worked with Chronicle Books, Nintendo, and Wall Street Journal, as well as Smart Ones, Fast Company and O Magazine. We’ve made it easy to explore our collection by using data to draw connections between different artists, media, moods or colours. Artists intended their explanations of their work to be printed unchanged, and often, their comments were used verbatim by critics.