Looking Out to Sea , watercolour This story about a recent exhibition of Winslow Homer’s paintings and drawings at the Milwaukee Art Museum begins with some personal details. I was born and raised in the north-east of England, in an area of farms and coal mines lying between Newcastle-upon-Tyne and a small coastal village called Cullercoats . England may be a small country, but in the British context the north-east is considered remote from ‘the center’ (i.e., London). This was even more true in the nineteenth century, when Cullercoats was a tiny dot on the map, just one of thousands of little bays on the coasts where close-knit communities of tough men and women made a dangerous living from the sea. How extraordinary it is, then, to discover that American artist Winslow Homer lived and worked in Cullercoats, England, for close to two years beginning in May 1881. Biographers are unsure as to why Homer chose such an obscure place for this extended stay. Nevertheless, it fits int
Artist Philip Hartigan talks about art, interviews other artists, and more