Robert & Russell meet artist Shawanda Corbett, best known for her ceramics, paintings and performances. Shawanda is a recent recipient of The Turner Bursary which replaces the Turner Prize 2020, recognised for her significant contribution to contemporary art in the UK during the past 12 months. We discuss the themes within “Neighbourhood Garden”, her current debut solo exhibition at Corvi-Mora gallery in South London, studying at the Ruskin at Oxford University, her admiration for her tutor ...
Jul 16, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Season 6Ep. 7
Season 6 continues! Russell & Robert chat to emerging artist Ana Benaroya from her studio in Jersey City, New Jersey. Recorded remotely on 19th April 2020 during lockdown, we are massive fans of Ana's paintings!!! We discuss her early career as an illustrator, her love of cartoons, her passion for drawing, identifying with male characters in 80s/90s movies growing up and how she developed studies of the human body, in her early paintings of male physicality and how her focus has recently shi...
Jul 13, 2020•1 hr•Season 6Ep. 7
New Talk Art! Russell & Robert meet Aindrea Emelife, art critic, independent curator, advisor and arts presenter. We discuss her recent powerful mission statement written for The Independent newspaper investigating how the art world can step up for Black Lives Matter. Aindrea spoke to leading figures for their perspectives including Jasmine Wahi, the Holly Block Social Justice Curator at the Bronx Museum in New York, Eva Langret, artistic director of Frieze London, Osei Bonsu, curator of int...
Jul 09, 2020•52 min•Season 6Ep. 6
On this week's Talk Art, we're feeling the POWER of LOVE! Russell & Robert chat to the captivating superstar duo of Ellie Goulding and Caspar Jopling from their home in Oxfordshire. As passionate art collectors, we learn about the artists they admire and collect including Rebecca Warren, Julie Mehretu, Tracey Emin, Donna Huanca, Raymond Pettibon, George Rouy, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jack Whitten, Raqib Shaw, Cy Gavin, Christina Quarles and Ellie’s favourite - a neon of a double cross by Jonathan ...
Jul 06, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Season 6Ep. 5
Season 6 continues! Recorded remotely on 3rd April 2020 during lockdown, Russell & Robert chat to leading artist Katherine Bradford, best known for her radiant paintings of swimmers, superheroes, ships and dreamy landscapes that critics describe as simultaneously representational and abstract, luminous, and richly metaphorical. We explore how Katherine changed her life aged 30 years old to become an artist moving with her twin children from Maine to New York City, making friends with Chris M...
Jun 29, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Season 6Ep. 4
Season 6 continues! Recorded remotely on 1st May 2020 during lockdown, Russell & Robert chat to Philadelphia-based artist Jonathan Lyndon Chase whose paintings and drawings focus primarily on queer black bodies in everyday, domestic spaces. We explore the importance of family including Jonathan's husband Will (who is also their studio manager), sea horses, shyness, Bipolar disorder, identifying as non-binary and the value of having a studio in their hometown of Philadelphia. We discuss humou...
Jun 22, 2020•59 min•Season 6Ep. 3
Talk Art Season 6 continues! Recorded during lockdown on 19th April 2020 from the Mexican jungle, Russell & Robert chat to Rose McGowan, leading activist, author, singer, actress and creative polymath. We discuss her debut album 'Planet 9', how creativity can promote healing, why Rose sees America as a cult, growing up as a child in the Children of God cult, Rose & Robert's shared admiration for her previous partner Marilyn Manson's Mechanical Animals album & the song Coma White that...
Jun 15, 2020•50 min•Season 6Ep. 2
Welcome to Season 6 of Talk Art! Recorded on 10th April 2020, we chat to Troy Michie, the acclaimed American collage artist, painter, interdisciplinary installation artist, and sculptor based in New York City. Michie's work is often in dialogue with the canon of collage; as well as investigating society's understanding of race, gender, sexuality, and other fields of identity and power. This episode is released on the anniversary of the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles from June 3-8th 1943, which h...
Jun 08, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 1
Recorded in New York on Sunday 26th January 2020, Russell & Robert meet leading artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, best known for her multimedia drawings and works on paper, which explore the malleability of identity and the possibilities in visual story-telling. Interested in the topography of skin, Ojih Odutola has a distinctive style of mark-making using only basic drawing materials, such as ballpoint pens, pencils, pastels and charcoal. This signature technique involves building up of layers on ...
Jun 01, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Season 5Ep. 18
Russell and Robert chat to leading English actor Josh O'Connor. We discuss family connections to art with his artist/ceramicist grandmother Romola Jane, the ongoing search to buy back her previously sold studio art pottery, his sculptor grandfather John Bunting who's wooden sculptures, bronzes & stone works was a contemporary of Henry Moore and teacher to artist Antony Gormley. We explore Josh's love of Modern British Art, learning to draw as taught by his grandfather, continuing to create h...
May 28, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Season 5Ep. 17
Russell & Robert chat to critically acclaimed German artist Lenz Geerk. Recorded at the start of lockdown, we discuss his psychologically charged paintings that are seemingly removed from any specific time or place. Emphasizing his subjects in such a way as to draw out the hidden emotions of the human psyche, Geerk depicts people at the threshold of excitation and in the throes of exploration or emotional tension. We discuss his daily journey to the studio, links in his work to art history i...
May 25, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Season 5Ep. 16
Russell & Robert meet legendary fashion writer Tim Blanks, Editor-at-large of Business Of Fashion and a passionate art fan/collector. We discuss growing up in New Zealand, hanging out in the late 70s with artist collective General Idea in New York, meeting Andy Warhol in Toronto, the influence of David Bowie, his love of The Photographer’s Gallery, collecting photography including Juergen Teller and a classic Horst photograph of Marlene Dietrich. We learn of his admiration for a new generati...
May 21, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Season 5Ep. 15
Russell & Robert meet Alice Rawsthorn OBE, the award-winning British design critic and author. Based in London, she is chair of the boards of trustees at Chisenhale Gallery in East London and The Hepworth Wakefield art gallery in Yorkshire. Alice was awarded an OBE for services to design and the arts. We discuss growing up in Manchester, studying at Cambridge University, her role as design critic for New York Times with a weekly column that ran for more than a decade, her experiences as a Tu...
May 18, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Season 5Ep. 14
Russell and Robert meet Edward Enninful OBE, editor-in-chief of British Vogue . Over the past two and a half years as editor-in-chief of the famed publication, he has helped shape a new vision for fashion media — not just in the UK, but globally — where he has placed a “diversity of perspective” at its core. Enninful has described his vision for British Vogue as “about being inclusive. It’s not just the colour of your skin but the diversity of perspective.” He has made art a priority including i...
May 14, 2020•59 min•Season 5Ep. 13
Russell & Robert meet leading artist Amoako Boafo. Best known for his contemporary portrait paintings, Boafo’s portraits are enticing in their lucidity, accentuating the figures in each work, who are regularly isolated on single colour backgrounds, their gaze the focal point of each work. Combing brushwork with finger painting, his use of paint is thick and gestural, the contours of the body’s almost soften into abstraction. The most well known of his series, the Black Diaspora portraits ser...
May 11, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Season 5Ep. 12
Russell and Robert meet American basketball legend Kevin Love and leading British art advisor Jane Suitor. Love is best known for playing for the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers. He is a five-time All-Star and won the 2016 NBA championship with the Cavaliers. Outside of sport, Love is a passionate art collector, closely advised by Suitor. Beginning his collecting journey in his late 20s, he has already built an impressive Blue Chip art collection including artists as varied as Ed Ruscha, Doug Aitken, ...
May 07, 2020•48 min•Season 5Ep. 11
Russell and Robert meet legendary art critic and writer Jerry Saltz for a feature-length special QuarARTine episode, as critical times call for critical thinking!!!! We discuss the future of art and the art world after coronavirus, what he remembers from the early 90s crash and his respect for how British artists responded and thrived. We find out why he wrote his new book 'How To Be An Artist', the decision to give up being an artist himself to drive trucks and limousines for over a decade, how...
May 04, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Season 5Ep. 10
Russell and Robert chat to legendary artist Lisa Yuskavage. Best-known for her groundbreaking, provocative figurative paintings, Lisa‘s images occupy a space between high and low; the sacred and the profane. In this feature-length special episode, we discuss her journey to making the work she truly loved, combatting working-class guilt whilst studying at Yale (and her friendship with architectural artist Maya Lin), reading a Diane Arbus biography, how an Alice Neel documentary influenced her thi...
Apr 30, 2020•1 hr 24 min•Season 5Ep. 9
QuarARTine continues!! Russell & Robert chat with gallerist, writer and curator Rózsa Farkas. Founder and Director of Arcadia Missa, a gallery focusing on “contemporary art with intent” that “began as a self-organised space in austerity Britain”. Beginning in 2011 as a multi-platform Peckham project space, it evolved into a commercial gallery by 2014 and is now located in Soho, central London. The space has provided new aesthetic approaches and alternative organisational structures with a dy...
Apr 27, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Season 5Ep. 8
Russell and Robert chat to Maria Balshaw CBE, Director of Tate, a family of four art galleries in London, Liverpool and Cornwall known as Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. Balshaw is Tate’s first female Director. We discuss the effect of the lockdown on Tate museums, filming guided tours for their website of the on-hold blockbuster Andy Warhol and Aubrey Beardsley exhibitions for the public to access during lockdown, the increased global usage of their website during th...
Apr 23, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Season 5Ep. 7
Russell and Robert meet leading artist Jordan Casteel who has rooted her practice in community engagement, painting from her own photographs of people she encounters. Posing her subjects within their natural environments, her nearly life-size portraits and cropped “subway” compositions chronicle personal observations of the human experience. In February 2020, Casteel opened a major solo exhibition 'Within Reach', curated by Massimiliano Gioni, at the New Museum. Bringing together nearly forty pa...
Apr 20, 2020•56 min•Season 5Ep. 6
Russell and Robert chat to music legend & flamboyant superstar Sir Elton John CBE from lockdown at his home in Los Angeles. We discuss art collecting, a lifelong obsession that began by collecting dinky toys and vinyl records during childhood, buying Man Ray posters at Athena when he first started songwriting with Bernie Taupin, why he started his photography collection in the early 1990s, what it was like to be photographed by Irving Penn, why he just missed out on getting his portrait take...
Apr 16, 2020•46 min•Season 5Ep. 5
Russell and Robert meet British artist Somaya Critchlow whose figurative paintings of women explore facets of race, sex and culture. Working mostly on a small scale, her works depict bold, curvaceous and self-possessed female characters, of her own creation, that simultaneously combine and subvert the culture expectations of race, gender and power in the history of portraiture. They are self-reflective and personal, and at the same time commentary of the cultural, class and political dynamics of...
Apr 13, 2020•59 min•Season 5Ep. 4
Ladies and Gentleman, the category is TALK ART!!!! Russell and Robert chat to superstar Billy Porter, the leading actor, singer, writer, fashion icon and star of award-winning TV show POSE. We chat about the lockdown closure of Broadway and New York's theatres, losing two friends to the Coronavirus pandemic, his appreciation for Lady Gaga, Erykah Badu, Boy George and Madonna, writing new music and a recent conversation with Salma Hayek that helped him realise that he makes & lives performanc...
Apr 09, 2020•55 min•Season 5Ep. 3
Russell and Robert meet artist Doron Langberg, an Israeli-born, Brooklyn-based painter. Langberg paints in the style of genre painting and portraiture, addressing issues of gender and sexuality creating a shared experience of love and desire through the surface and subjects of his paintings. Langberg paints large-scale portraits of family, close friends and lovers. These visualizations of queerness—both his own and those of the many queer subjects depicted—move beyond the traditional shorthand o...
Apr 06, 2020•56 min•Season 5Ep. 2
Russell and Robert return for Season 5! Recorded primarily during quarantine lockdown, we’ve reached out to international creative guests from art, design, music, sport, fashion, TV and film. Every Tuesday & Friday (yes, twice a week!) we will bring you voices that inspire us and that we hope will inspire you too. These are unprecedented, scary, challenging and deeply sad times. We strongly believe in art and in its power to unify, to resonate, to bring hope through adversity, to offer encou...
Apr 02, 2020•53 min•Season 5Ep. 1
Robert & Russell meet Mark Gatiss, the influential British actor, screenwriter, director and novelist. We discuss Mark's recent BBC4 art documentary 'John Minton: The Lost Man of British Art', celebrating the life and work of the highly prolific and successful 20th century English artist whose work is now all but forgotten. A contemporary of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, Minton suffered psychological problems, self-medicated with alcohol, and in 1957 died by suicide. We chat in depth about...
Mar 27, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Season 4Ep. 12
Russell & Robert meet leading British photographer Alasdair McLellan. World-renowned for his sensitive approach to photography across fashion, portraiture, landscape or documentary, his work embraces references high and low, classical and pop, and continues to reflect contemporary conversations around gender, sexuality and identity. McLellan’s photography has been exhibited at the ICA, Somerset House, National Portrait Gallery and Phillips. We discuss the British male nude, his recurrent pho...
Mar 20, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Season 4Ep. 11
Robert & Russell meet the one-and-only legend that is Princess Julia!!!! We discuss her endless creativity across different worlds of music, fashion and art, life-drawing and her weekly trip to ‘Sketch Sesh’, her friendship with DJ Jeffry Hinton, and how she started DJing herself at queer spaces in London. We find out what it’s like to be photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans, her memories of being the coat check girl at Blitz & Taboo nightclubs, Leigh Bowery, Boy George, Jordan (a Malcolm M...
Mar 13, 2020•1 hr•Season 4Ep. 10
Russell & Robert meet British artist Ima-Abasi Okon. Ima's current solo exhibition is at VOID, Derry~Londonderry and runs until 25th April 2020. This episode was recorded in July 2019 during an earlier iteration of Ima's solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, London. Ima works with sculpture, sound and video to produce installations that explore exhibition-making as an exercise in syntax, adopting linguistic and grammatical structures within her installations as a way of complicating the con...
Mar 06, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 4Ep. 9
