The Independent says of her “Annie Kevans has an eye for what makes an eye-catching portrait. Her oil-on-paper likenesses look simple, almost childlike, but they come with a sting in the tail. The 36-year-old artist began painting in her final year at St Martin’s with Boys, a set of pictures of dictators as children – a blue-eyed Hitler in a simple brown jacket, a wan Franco, a petulant Pol Pot. “People think it’s a bit naff, really cutesy and then, oof, it’s Hitler.”

The portraits are not actual likenesses but rather the product of guesswork and imagination. She had spent months looking for pictures of infant dictators finding them very hard to come by so she abandoned her search “I thought, ‘Does it matter anyway if I make them up?’ It caused quite a lot of debate.” And interest, too: Charles Saatchi snapped up the degree show in its entirety. ”

At the art fair Volta in Basel this summer, she presented All the Presidents’ Girls, a series of portraits of Presidential mistresses. Many such as Marilyn Monroe and Monica Lewinsky are well known but some such as Sally Hemings, the 15-year-old slave and maid to Thomas Jefferson’s daughter, who became pregnant with the President’s child, are not so well known.

In her latest exhibition she has turned her attention to mental illness and addiction. The exhibition “Ship of Fools” features portraits of Michael Jackson,(above) Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, Drew Barrymore and Princess Diana, Vincent Van Gogh amongst others. She says of the show “I’ve always been interested in madness – there’s a lot of it in my family,”

Ship of Fools opens today and continues until 23 December in FAS on New Bond Street, London W1 �

Rita Marcolo a performance artist has provoked controversy over her plans to induce an epileptic fit in front of a live audience. She plans to do this at the Bradford Playhouse next month and will induce the fit with the aid of alcohol and strobe lighting. Entitled Involuntary Dances, the artist claims its purpose is to explore the relationship between epilepsy and dance. Sounds like baloney? Not according to the Arts Council England who have given her a £13,899 grant along with a £7000 commission for the proposed piece.

Marcolo, who is an award winning choreographer is artistic director of her own company, Instant Dissidence, based in Leeds, has invited the audience to film her fit, saying she wants to educate the public about the potentially fatal disease. She says she has been horrified by films up-loaded to the internet of sufferers during a fit that have been put there without the persons permission and that this is partly why she has decided to induce a fit in public.

“As someone with epilepsy, the threat of seizure is something I deal with every day of my life. It is an invisible disability but most of us know someone with it. My intention is to raise awareness of the condition by making it visible. People will have their own opinion but I am doing this from an artistic perspective.”she says. Going on to deny that what she is doing is dangerous, the artist says “I am interested in creating work that makes people consider certain things they don’t normally think about. It raises questions. I knew it could be controversial but I am doing this because it is personal to me.”

Describing the experience of a fit she said “It begins by feeling like an aura which is very disorientating. It feels like all the senses you take for granted are changed – your visual perception, how your body feels, your skin, your intestines – everything is altered. It feels very painful and disturbing. That is the most difficult part. When I am unconscious I feel nothing and afterwords you just feel very tired.”

However Philip Lee, chief executive of Epilepsy Action, has said “This is potentially very dangerous and something we would strongly urge this person not to do. Seizures can bring with them the risk of injury from jerking or falling and, in the worst cases, death.”

An unusual art sale begins today at the Royal College of Art. For those not put off by the day that is in it, Friday 13th, it represents a good opportunity to try your luck. More than 800 leading artists and up and coming artists from the college have created 2,500 postcards for sale to the public.

You can buy an original piece of art by the likes of Anish Kapoor, Grayson Perry or Yoko Ono for just £40. The catch is they are signed on the back so you will not know who created your postcard until you have actually bought it.

The “Secret Postcard Exhibition” will run until the 21st December,  plenty of time to track down a Richter or Baldessari,and the proceeds of the auction will be given to charity. The exhibition is open to the public from today but the auction will be confined to one day, the 21st December.

Raffle tickets are on sale each day until a half hour before the exhibition closes. These are for the first fifty places in the sale  line on the day of the auction. You can register on-line for the auction but you must buy in person.

Twelve Rue Chabanais was once the most famous brothel in Paris. Now the address is host to an exhibition “Sin City” which aims to celebrate the history of the Paris Brothel. The curator, Nicole Canet, describes herself as an “archaeologist of eroticism”.  Canet has assembled a diverse collection of items associated with the brothels from phallic door knocks to whips, handcuffs and other tools of the trade.

Opened in 1878, it counted Edward VII as one of its patrons and in fact a “love chair” he donated to the brothel in celebration of happy times is one of the exhibits on display. Later on Hollywood stars such as Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart were regulars. It may surprise some that it was not just men who frequented the establishment, the actress and singer Marlene Dietrich treated it as an alternative nightspot to the Hotel Ritz. “She would drink enormous quantities of champagne there,” Ms Canet said.

Canet says “These places capture a world of sensuality and worldliness in Paris in the Belle Époque and Roaring Twenties, reflecting an art of living fueled by desire and eccentricity; a forgotten world of champagne bubbles and the comings and goings of girls and their clients under the watchful eye of the choreographer who was the hostess.”

Brothels were made illegal in France in 1946. At the time there were 1,500 of them with 177 in Paris alone. Ms Canet supports making them legal again saying “It would be much better for the women working who don’t want to be outside on the streets, but as it’s illegal to demand money for sex, this seems very unlikely.”

The show runs until 31 January 2010.�

A restoration expert has expressed concerns that valuable art works could be literally rotting away under their owners noses. Specialist ceramic restorer Penny Bendall says

“The concern is that people who have already lost money in the recession could be watching investments literally rot away because art is being kept in the wrong place or the wrong conditions,. “

“And often it’s a matter of taking simple steps - the sort of thing they showed you how to do on Blue Peter. It’s a bit like shoes - keep them clean and polished and they’ll last.”

Bendall came to prominence three years ago after re-building three Quing Dynasty vases (featured above) shattered at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. So concerned has she become about the issue that she is organising a conservation conference for the 26th and 27th of October. Speakers at “the art of conservation” conference at the V&A in South Kensington, include Robert Child, Head of Conservation at the National Museum of Wales, Jo Dillon, Objects Conservator at The Fitzwilliam Museum, and Rupert Featherstone, who was Senior Painting Conservator for The Royal Collection.

Irish readers who are concerned about the condition of an artwork they own or are worried about how best to store it should contact an expert such as the Art Clinic to seek advice.

The Tate Modern’s plans to extend to sixty percent more exhibition space would appear to be in trouble. Only a third of the required finance has been raised and included in that is fifty million promised by the Government which is now looking shaky because of a £100m budget overcommitment for capital projects at the department for culture, media and sport.

Despite all of this, Lord Browne the chairman of Tate was in an upbeat mood when he presented the annual report earlier this week. Speaking about the promised government money, he said he was”highly confident that the promised money will be delivered.” In relation to the shortfall in fundraising he said “My sense is that confidence has come back to potential benefactors. Investors feel better about making donations. We intend to start building next year and, subject to the amount of funding we have in place, we are intending to have a building ready by 2012.”

Problems with the proposed extension aside, it was a good year for the Tate with record acquisitions to report. A gift of over seven hundred art works, ranging from pieces by Hirst to Warhol being a case in point. The works were given to Tate jointly with National Galleries of Scotland by former art dealer, Anthony D’Offay.

There are also ambitious plans for exhibitions next year. Tate will host the first major exhibition of works by Paul Gauguin (featured above) in London for over half a century. According to Vicente Todolí, director of Tate Modern, the exhibition will “challenge assumptions about his practice and reveal his complexity and richness”, looking at Gauguin’s role as a narrative painter and a “maker of fables”. It will establish him as “one of the pillars of 20th-century art”

Tate Liverpool will stage a large-scale Picasso show in May. The show will focus on the post war era, when Picasso was an activist and a peace campaigner. It will feature the painting Charnel House, said to be the artists most political painting after Guernica. It was painted after news first broke of the Nazi death camps.

The annual report is positive and upbeat with ambitious plans for the future despite the economic downturn.

The South Bank Centre in London was the venue for a very unusual art workshop last weekend. Hundreds of the blowfly larvae were daubed with paint by children to create abstract works of art as part of Pestival - a festival about insects which was held in the South Bank.

Organised by animal behaviour experts from Manchester University, the workshop attracted over 120 children and their collective work has been published on facebook. Dr Matthew Cobb, who bought the maggots in a fishing tackle shop, said “We wanted to show children – and grown-ups – that maggots are cute and not scary, and that they can make amazing patterns. We just put the maggots in non-toxic paint, and they did the rest, leaving wriggling paint trails behind them that look a bit like Jackson Pollock’s famous “action paintings”.

Of course Damien Hirst has used maggots before in his installation A Thousand Years. It featured a cows head in a glass container being eaten by maggots. When they turned into flies they were promptly dispatched by an electric fly zapper. Dr Cobb and his team took a more humane approach to their subjects, giving them a good wash down before releasing them in a compost heap.

Most important of all, the kids had a great time as Dr Cobb said “The children had great fun, and could even learn what colours maggots can see – by using torches producing different colours of light, they could direct the maggots around the paper.”

A beautifully decorated silver chalice filled with silver coins and jewelery known as the Vale of York hoard goes on display at the British Museum, London this week. Described as the most significant Viking find since 1870, it was discovered by a father and son team of metal detector enthusiasts David and Andrew Whelan. The Whelans along with the owner of the field in which they found the hoard now share £1,082,000 the value that was put on the hoard.

The British Museum’s curator of medieval coinage, Gareth Williams, recalled the huge and growing excitement after the hoard came to the museum in 2007. “It was clear as soon as the vessel came in that we had something very important. Once we got the x-rays we could see it was packed with silver. Even then, I don’t think we anticipated how much.”

There was in fact 617 coins stuffed into the chalice some from as far away as northern Russia and Afghanistan. The intricately decorated chalice was probably looted from a monastery in France. Experts say that the find represents the life savings of a wealthy Viking and was buried approximately one thousand years ago. They can only speculate as to why its owner never returned to collect it.

Williams says  the hoard will greatly increase our understanding of the Vikings  trading connections, cultural contacts and cultural diversity .  “We use Viking as a shorthand term and there’s the traditional raping and pillaging image of the Vikings. That was replaced in the 1970s by what I think of as the fluffy bunny school of Viking studies which said, actually, they’re all peaceful traders and farmers. The truth is they are both.”

“I was a portrait painter, had done a degree as a mature student and was always interested in human nature and experience. Death Row is one of the few places in the world where people are trying to kill you; most of the time we are trying to extend human life.”

The above quote is from Claire Phillips a portrait artist who has traveled to the USA to paint prisoners on death row. The resulting portraits go on show at The Capitol, Horsham from the 15th of August to the 9th October. The show is titled “The Human Face of Death Row” and will go on tour after its run in The Capitol.

Phillips says she became involved in the project after painting the portrait of Clive Stafford Smith, Director of the death row advocate group Reprieve. While she was painting his portrait, he suggested to her that she should paint the portraits of death row prisoners to give a human face to those who have been demonised as monsters.

Her subjects include Linda Carty (pictured above) who has been on death row in Texas for the last eight years. Her conviction, for killing a neighbour, was based almost entirely on the testimonies of three alleged accomplices, all career criminals. Carty claims she is innocent.

Another subject is Howard Neal, who was sentenced to death in 1982 having been convicted of the murder of his niece and half brother. He has been in and out of mental institutions for most of his life.

According to Rob Sharp in The Independent “The art competently conveys the characters behind the convictions. Neal, who has been in and out of mental institutions for much of his life, stares straight ahead with a look of faint amusement, his head quizzically tilted to one side. Carty, on the other hand, is shown closer up, sporting a look of pinched-lip defiance.”

There is no Irish date  for the proposed tour but hopefully it will come here at some stage. I for one will definitely catch it as it promises to be a fascinating insight to a hidden world.

 “I really came to Tennyson through painting. Wherever I looked at the painters I loved – Millais, Holman Hunt, Watts – I realised they were completely in awe of Tennyson. The house struck me as like a work of art, too, a painting in urgent need of sensitive restoration.”

The above quote by Martin Beisly, senior expert on Victorian painting at Christie’s auction house, gives some idea of the influence Tennyson’s poetry has had on the arts, particularly Victorian art. Beisly and friend Rebecca Fitzgerald have bought Farringford House on the Isle of Wight, Tennyson’s home of 40 years, and after much restoration have, this week, opened the doors to the public. The library has been restored to museum display standards, and will house regular exhibitions. With curator Veronica Franklin Gould, an expert on the period, they have secured major loans from national collections, including the Watts Gallery in Compton and the Tennyson study centre in Lincoln, which holds the family archives.

Tennyson moved to The Isle of Wight in 1853 having become weary of all the attention his considerable fame had brought him in London. An A list celebrity of his day, Tennyson found it impossible to work in London anymore. However he was not to be left alone and the house was host to an endless stream of the great and the good.  Disraeli, Darwin, Lewis Carroll, Giuseppe Garibaldi and the Queen of Hawaii to name but a few.

The house became a hotel in the early 20th century, owned at different times by both Thomas Cook of the travel firm, and Sir Fred Pontin of holiday camp fame. Over the years, the house became dilapidated and run down until it was bought three years ago by the current owners, Biesly and Fitzgerald. It now promises to be a showcase foe Victorian art and a testimony to the influence a man of letters had on the visual arts.