Conant International

  Yad Vashem Art Collection , Indian ink and wash on paper A German-Jewish surrealist painter born in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, NW Germany, Nussbaum gives us in his artwork a glimpse into the mind of one individual among the victims of the Holocaust. He was murdered at Auschwitz. By 1944 his entire family had been wiped out. ‘The Great Disaster’, like Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ completed a few years earlier, stands as a protest at the horror and cruelty of war as it affects a civilian population. ‘When I perish, do not allow my pictures to die with me,’ he wrote. ‘Show them to people.’ ‘The demise of Europe plays itself out against a backdrop of destroyed buildings. Both a full moon and the sun are visible in the somber, overcast sky. A group of figures appear in the center of the work, among them a woman crouching on the ground next to a standing figure with hands raised to the sky. The bodies of other victims are scattered throughout the scene. In the left foreground, two figure...

A copy, in All Saints Church East Budleigh, of one of the best known portraits of Sir Walter formerly attributed to Zuccaro but now to the monogrammist 'H' (? Hubbard) and dated 1588. It shows Raleigh in court dress at the height of his favour with Queen Elizabeth I. Raleigh had been appointed Captain of the Guard in 1587   Only a few minutes' drive away from East Budleigh's Salem Chapel is Hayes Barton, where Sir Walter Raleigh was born at some time between 1552 and 1554. Wouldn't it be only right, I thought, if this great Devonian could find a place in our virtual Peace Museum.  But Raleigh does not have a reputation as a peacemaker. Courtier, poet, soldier, explorer, historian he certainly was, and for most of his life, an enemy of Spain. In 1618, after his disastrous second voyage to Guiana resulted in the reinstatement of the death sentence there was jubilation at the Spanish court.   Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count of Gondomar, a title awarded by King Phil...

‘The Rock Drill’: Reconstruction by Ken Cook and Ann Christopher RA after Jacob Epstein’s original version, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery (1974)  Image credit: Elliott Brown The American-born sculptor Jacob Epstein often produced controversial works which challenged ideas on what was appropriate subject matter for public artworks.  Jacob Epstein self-portrait, c.1912, National Portrait Gallery, London. Photo by   Nihil novi. Image credit: Wikipedia His art is displayed all over the world; highly original for its time, its influence on the younger generation of sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth was significant. Epstein's 1913 sculpture 'The Rock Drill'  in its original form. Photographer unknown ‘The Rock Drill’ is one of his best known works. A protest against war? The original version, a plaster figure perched on top of an actual industrial rock drill, was first displayed at Brighton City Art Gallery from December 1913 to January 1914. ...

© John Washington 2021 The artist has depicted an incident in 1625 when Roger Conant, founder of Salem, Massachusetts, mediated in a potentially violent situation between Plymouth Colony military Captain Myles Standish and some fishermen at Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Conant, born in 1592 at East Budleigh, Devon, had emigrated to New England some two years before the events depicted in the painting. John Washington graduated from Wimbledon Art School in illustration and worked in design and advertising agencies in this country and abroad before settling in retirement at Budleigh Salterton on the coast of East Devon. John Washington in costume as Sir John Everett Millais  Painting scenes from history is not John Washington’s usual activity as an artist. However in 2018 he was involved in a project based on the re-enactment of a scene from Budleigh Salterton’s history. The Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir John Everett Millais visited the town in order to start work on his celebrated p...

The Memorial Cenotaph at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in 2018.  Image credit:  Balon Greyjoy; Wikipedia   The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in the centre of Hiroshima, Japan, is dedicated to the legacy of Hiroshima as the first city in the world to suffer a nuclear attack at the end of World War II, and to the memories of the bomb's direct and indirect victims (of whom there may have been as many as 140,000).  The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is visited by more than one million people each year. It was planned and designed by the Japanese architect Kenzō Tange. Among the Park’s features is the Flame of Peace, seen through the Memorial Cenotaph in the image above. Its pedestal was designed to suggest two hands pressed together at the wrist and bent back so that the palms point up to the sky. The flame has burned continuously since it was lit on August 1, 1964, and is intended to burn until the day when ‘all nuclear weapons shall have disappeared from the ear...

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, oil on canvas, 349 cm × 776 cm, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid Pablo Picasso, Guernica by LYNN ROBINSON What would be the best way today to protest against a war? How could you influence the largest number of people? In 1937, Picasso expressed his outrage against war with Guernica, his enormous mural-sized painting displayed to millions of visitors at the Paris World’s Fair. It has since become the twentieth century’s most powerful indictment against war, a painting that still feels intensely relevant today. Much of the painting’s emotional power comes from its overwhelming size, approximately eleven feet tall and twenty five feet wide. Guernica is not a painting you observe with spatial detachment; it feels like it wraps around you, immerses you in its larger-than-life figures and action. And although the size and multiple figures reference the long tradition of European history paintings, this painting is different because it challenges rather than acc...