Sunday Preview: New Work

Blake Milteer’s drawings reward close looking. Built through dense, intricate graphite marks on wood panel, they hold the eye first as landscape, then as surface, then as evidence of hand and pressure. Roots, branches and natural forms twist into one another; dead matter becomes compost, and the landscape becomes a site of regrowth.

As these are pencil drawings on wood panel, they have the intimacy and detail of works on paper, but with the ease of a panel work. They can go straight on the wall, and they invite people to come closer.

Tom Speedy’s early momentum has been unusually strong: RSA John Kinross Scholar, selected for RSA New Contemporaries, two solo exhibitions, and recent inclusion in Don’t Look Back at Unit London during Frieze week, alongside artists including Tracey Emin, Gavin Turk, Polly Morgan, Richard Billingham and Thomas J Price.

The works carry that sense of scale and ambition. One painting grew out of his experience of witnessing the Palio in Siena: a historic bareback horse race, but also a crowded civic ritual of colour, rivalry, ceremony and force.

Helen Latham: It is the double lens of Helen Latham’s work that makes it so strong: she inhabits the inner world of childhood from within, then renders it with the full consciousness, technique and sophistication of an adult artist.

The paintings show a child’s world felt from the inside. Embodied, luminous, tactile and real. They seem to remember the past as something still living, still breathing, still available through the skin.

A new series by Helen Latham will be released tomorrow morning which can be previewed on her page. If you are interested in a particular piece, let me know and I’ll update you tomorrow with availability and a link to purchase.

Wishing you a good week ahead.

Artwork by Helen Latham