Jon King – författare

Vanessa Bell’s art and life were animated by the complex emotions of motherhood: creativity and care bound up with doubt, desire and ambivalence. This is the first book to focus exclusively on the influence of motherhood in Bell’s art, exploring how it shaped her creative vision and its lasting legacy at Charleston, her country home.In 1916 Bell moved with her young children and the painter Duncan Grant to Charleston, a remote farmhouse in the Sussex Downs that became a home for art, intimacy and experiment. There she lived until her death in 1961, creating a world where the boundaries between painting and living dissolved, and where care and collaboration lay at the heart of artistic life.Moving beyond familiar Bloomsbury biography, Vanessa Bell and Charleston offers a strikingly intimate portrait of Bell at work and at home, and how her art transformed the texture of everyday life. In a feminist and queer reappraisal of Bloomsbury, Jon King unearths Bell's experience of motherhood, and the ways in which her artistic vision unsettled the boundaries between mother and child. The book traces the emotional afterlife of this vision through four generations of women: from Bell’s mother, Julia Stephen, to the photographic legacy of her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, and onward to her daughter, the writer and artist Angelica Garnett. Through these intertwined lives, it explores how motherhood was inherited, contested and reimagined across time.Richly illustrated, it brings together paintings, photographs and objects of the home, from Bell’s decorated rooms and family album to the camp Famous Women dinner service of 1932, to show how the domestic imagination, in its maternal, queer and collaborative forms, reverberates through the story of both Bloomsbury and British modernism more broadly.

Vanessa Bell’s art and life were animated by the complex emotions of motherhood: creativity and care bound up with doubt, desire and ambivalence. This is the first book to focus exclusively on the influence of motherhood in Bell’s art, exploring how it shaped her creative vision and its lasting legacy at Charleston, her country home.In 1916 Bell moved with her young children and the painter Duncan Grant to Charleston, a remote farmhouse in the Sussex Downs that became a home for art, intimacy and experiment. There she lived until her death in 1961, creating a world where the boundaries between painting and living dissolved, and where care and collaboration lay at the heart of artistic life.Moving beyond familiar Bloomsbury biography, Vanessa Bell and Charleston offers a strikingly intimate portrait of Bell at work and at home, and how her art transformed the texture of everyday life. In a feminist and queer reappraisal of Bloomsbury, Jon King unearths Bell's experience of motherhood, and the ways in which her artistic vision unsettled the boundaries between mother and child. The book traces the emotional afterlife of this vision through four generations of women: from Bell’s mother, Julia Stephen, to the photographic legacy of her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, and onward to her daughter, the writer and artist Angelica Garnett. Through these intertwined lives, it explores how motherhood was inherited, contested and reimagined across time.Richly illustrated, it brings together paintings, photographs and objects of the home, from Bell’s decorated rooms and family album to the camp Famous Women dinner service of 1932, to show how the domestic imagination, in its maternal, queer and collaborative forms, reverberates through the story of both Bloomsbury and British modernism more broadly.

TO HELL WITH POVERTY! documents Jon King's story from a South London slum and impoverished working-class background to international success as core musician, lyricist, writer, and producer in legendary post-punk/funk band Gang of Four. The reader is taken on an episodic and kaleidoscopic journey full of adventures from childhood to the end of Gang of Four's 'golden period' in 1984. Thrown off Top of the Pops, truncheoned by police at an anti-Nazi rally, being at the heart of Leeds music scene and the UK post-punk movement in the 1970s, fraternising with Hell's Angels and other undesirables, supported by bands like REM and playing with the likes of the Police and Talking Heads, King's times with Gang of Four are rich with stories.

'Entertaining and revealing . . . it offers a deeply human portrait of its narrator, a creative force shaped by chaos, resilience and an unrelenting drive to make art. It is a personal and, at times, harrowing journey which provides insight into a band that contributed to the evolution of rock music and inspired generations' Louder Than War'To Hell With Poverty! captures something of [Gang of Four's] essence rare: fractious, discordant, thrilling' MOJOFrom Jon King, the legendary frontman of iconic post-punk band, Gang of Four, comes a memoir to remember.To Hell With Poverty! documents Jon's story from a south London slum and working-class background to international success as core musician, lyricist, writer, and producer in acclaimed post-punk/funk band, Gang of Four. Made up of charming vignettes, the reader is taken on an episodic journey full of raucous adventures from Jon's childhood and teenage years, to the height of Gang of Four's success in the seventies and eighties.Thrown off of Top of the Pops, truncheoned by police at an anti-Nazi rally, being at the heart of the Leeds music scene and the UK postpunk movement, fraternising with Hell's Angels and other undesirables, supported by bands like R.E.M. and playing with the Buzzcocks, there's no doubt King's time with Gang of Four is rich with jaw-dropping stories.Evocative, pacey and witty in equal measure, To Hell With Poverty! is a music memoir for the ages

A focus on Wright of Derby’s hugely atmospheric ‘candlelight’ paintings, which have become his most popular works.Renowned for his depictions of dramatic contrasts between darkness and light, Joseph Wright of Derby created a significant series of paintings ‘by candlelight’ between 1765 and 1773. Centred around masterpieces including An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump from the National Gallery and A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery from Derby Museum and Art Gallery, this publication explores the social and artistic context of these pictures, foregrounding them as outstanding examples of European painting.The candlelight scenes offer a wealth of insights into Wright’s own thinking as well as contemporary preoccupations during the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, reflecting the artist’s concerns with death, melancholy, scientific progress and scepticism. The publication also discusses aesthetic debates concerning the sublime, as well as childhood wonder, curiosity and the loss of innocence. In addition to paintings and mezzotints, it considers related objects, such as contemporary scientific instruments.Published by National Gallery Global Ltd/Distributed by Yale University Press