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Power & Pain, Love & Madness: Brett Anderson Curates The Collections of Art UK
The Quietus , May 16th, 2020 09:06

The Suede frontman curates a selection of ten paintings from the UK's public collections, in a virtual exhibition prepared exclusively for the Quietus

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Alesso Baldovinetti – Portrait of a Lady in Yellow
This calm, serene painting has a personal resonance for me as it was one of my parents’ favourites. When I was a child I remember them buying a postcard of it during one of our rainy, half-term day trips to London and bringing it back home and my father mounting it on a small wooden block fashioned with a cheap doweling boarder. There she sat on the wall of our little Haywards Heath council house next to the mean, grey-tiled fireplace staring out over her cramped kingdom watching over the endless fraught Christmases and suffering the pipe-smoke. After my dad died and it was time to clear up his things and stuff his possessions into black bin-bags it was one of the handful of bits I really wanted to keep and now she sits again staring out at me in my writing room at home like she did all those years ago.