This week's Sunday Art Dialogue explores the captivating collage works of British artist Richard Crooks Collage, from the French coller meaning "to glue," emerged as a revolutionary artistic technique in the early twentieth century. It is widely credited to the pioneering experiments of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who began incorporating fragments of newspapers, wallpaper and found materials into their Cubist paintings around 1912. Their radical approach challenged the traditional...

Art history is rarely the story of solitary genius. It is often the product of a creative ecosystem—a symbiotic relationship between artists, patrons, collectors, critics, curators, and salonnières. Without artists there is no art to champion; without champions, many artists might never be seen. Frequently, these influencers were women who led the way. ⁠ ⁠ Behind many artistic revolutions stood remarkable women who were cultural powerhouses such as Lady Ottoline Merrell, Gertrude Stein and...

Today I would like to discuss how artists conceive their subject matter, where do their ideas come from? This is a question about creativity, which has always fascinated me. Does an artist discover a subject through observation of the world, or create it through imagination? There are observation based artists such as John Constable's landscapes or Lucien Freud's portraits. They work from direct visual experiences and are concerned with recording appearances. Then there are imagination based...