Iona, in the Western Isles of Scotland, has long attracted artists, keen to interpret the ever-shifting visual interplay between sea, sky and shoreline.

To that list you can add contemporary oil painter Frances Macdonald, currently enjoying a solo show – largely featuring oil paintings of Iona – at Portland Gallery, on Bennet St, St James

In 2006, the painter Hurvin Anderson accompanied his father to his regular barbershop, situated in a converted attic in the centre of Birmingham.

It was a Jamaican barbershop, which made the father – a Windrush immigrant – feel at home, as it was designed to do, painted in bright colours, the walls covered with posters of iconic black figures and newspaper cuttings: a very Caribbean clutter.

Hurvin Anderson: Salon Paintings runs at Hastings Contemporary until March 3.

The Scottish artist Charles Hodge Mackie RSA RSW, the founding president of the Scottish Society of Artists, had a fruitful love affair with Venice, and made several extended visits to the ‘La Serenissima’ between 1908 and 1914, creating many works which significantly enhanced his reputation. You can admire his work at the Fine Art Society’s latest exhibition, titled Twentieth Century, at their London gallery.

The National Portrait Gallery’s 2020 exhibition of portraits painted (and otherwise created) by David Hockney closed after just 22 days, due to governmental Covid restrictions. Hockney has since continued to invite sitters to his Normandy studio – including pop singer Harry Styles, pictured above – and 33 of these will be included in a new version of the exhibition, Drawing from Life, to be displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in November. Tickets have gone on sale this week…

There’s double reason to go to the National Gallery this week, with one stunning temporary exhibition just opened, and another set to close.

First up, Crivelli’s Garden, the monumental mural created thirty years ago by the late Paula Rego. Rego’s work stretches ten metres across and depicts female characters from the Bible, the Golden Legend (a medieval compilation of the lives of the saints) and other traditional folklore sources, reimagined through Rego’s very female gaze.

A strange thing happened at the private view of Long & Ryle’s solo exhibition of the paintings of Kate Montgomery, in Pimlico on Wednesday evening (June 29th). The wine was flowing, and there was a convivial atmosphere, as the Brighton-based artist, up for the evening, held court. But, in any photographs taken of the party, there won’t have been many faces in shot: just lots of backs of heads. I’ve never been to an art opening at which so many people spent so long looking at the art.

If there’s one place where mankind can claim victory in the struggle to tame and colonise nature, it’s got to be the Cotswolds. Which is probably why the ‘Beast of Burford’ – a black panther supposedly on the prowl in Oxfordshire – has become such a popular local legend. The painter John Lendis has made the Cotswolds his home, after spells abroad and is fond of inhabiting his landscapes of the area with repeated motifs: of foxes, angels and Landrover Defenders.