Living Pictures

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As narrator and guide. . .Barskova makes the unprocessed grief come alive. She spins it into non-narrative and non-linear poems and prose, a pastiche which mimics the very nature of traumatic memory: disassociated and halting. Alex’s workshop was a great insight into the image-fuelled world of an actor. Especially for directors looking for a simple yet powerful language to communicate with actors.” With more than 300 images by nearly 100 photographers, the largest-ever survey of south-east Asian photography is on show at the National Gallery Singapore. It attempts to place photography from and about the region in the compendiums of local art history, and in the history of photography at large. Finally, Contemporary Imaginations immerses the visitor in the explosion of images in the present day. Referring to Walter Benjamin’s question about whether art was photography, this section recognises the omnipresence of photography as ‘a way of seeing, thinking, and interacting’ with the world. Here we see the vibrant and multilayered tableaux of Filipina artist Wawi Navarroza [above], who combines self-portraiture with the assembly of disparate objects to reflect on self and place. Representation is a recurring theme in the section, which unavoidably engages with political matters. In Dinh Q Lê’s Crossing the Farther Shore, for example, we see found photographs of anonymous South Vietnamese families taken before the country’s reunification in 1975. Our stakeholders include the students from the Canolfan Elfed Unit at Queen Elizabeth High School, who visit the land most days of the week learning new skills relating to tools and gardening, cooking and enjoying the outdoors.

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The benefits so far have been immense for our participants, sometimes providing the highlight of their educational week. Artwork is always a winner when it comes to filling wall space. If structured grids and galleries aren’t for you, create a more informal look with a mix of painted watercolours or oil-painted pieces displayed in vintage picture frames. Barskova’s arguments or presentations of history or biography tend to follow poetic logic, and her own biography and recollections rest atop the city’s tragedy. Not necessarily. It can be easy to get carried away and try to fill every wall with decor, but if there’s too much going on in one room it can feel a little overpowering. Creating balance is key to any successful decorating scheme. So if you have one area that’s quite busy visually, counteract this by having areas that feel calmer and have less going on. We give thousands of blind and partially sighted people the opportunity to borrow our Touch to See books from a free postal library.

Our Carmarthenshire centre, Coed Dylan provides opportunities in sustainable gardening and land-based enterprises as well as creative workshops. Our mission there is to champion inclusion and nurture skills and lifelong learning via the natural world. Create a calm and cosy living room scheme by painting walls and woodwork to match in a dark, dusky shade. Warmer tones feel enveloping and rich and are ideal for living spaces where we want to relax and cocoon ourselves away. Polina Barskova was born and brought up in Leningrad over 30 years after the end of the siege of that city by the Germans during WWII. The siege lasted from September 1941 to January 1944. The siege cast a long shadow which still affected the lives of the children in the 1970s and early 1980s. Reminders were all around, a preserved bomb shelter, missing buildings, walls scarred by shell fragments, and in memorials. A rule of thumb is that a single picture (or group of pictures) shouldn’t be wider than the actual sofa itself. Aim for something that measures roughly two thirds the length of the sofa - this could be one large picture or an arrangement of several smaller pictures.Dark living room walls also make a great foil for rich colours, plush textures and metallic finishes, so bring in lots of sparkle and shine on accent furniture, soft furnishings and wall art. Make your own art with a length or two of metallic wallpaper on a large panel, an easy way of introducing a touch of pattern without a full-on look.

Set in places as diverse as San Francisco, small-town Massachusetts, Siberia, and (of course) Leningrad–Petersburg, these stories come forward as searchingly intimate and by turns tender, sensuous, macabre, absurd, ambivalent, yet always immensely and movingly vulnerable.

Living Pictures is . . . a richly woven book on art, artists, the conditions of their mutual pervasion in times of endurance. While more traditional to paint skirtings and woodwork in standard white, this creates a harsh break that jars the eye visually, while continuous colour helps blur the lines and will also save cutting-in time when painting. Don’t shy away from using darker paint colours in a small living room. Dark colours on walls can create a receding effect so that walls seem further away, visually enlarging the space.