Art Archives - The Last Tuesday Society

Drawing ghosts – a workshop with Sian Ellis – Zoom

Drawing ghosts – a workshop

An online workshop with Illustrator Sian Ellis in which participants will learn how to draw ghosts. Whether cartoonish, cute, terrifying or ominous we’ll cover all the basics of how to capture a spirit in visual form. In this workshop we will study examples of ghosts in art throughout history before creating a hand-drawn haunted illustration of our own. Sian is an award-winning illustrator based in Sheffield and known for her playful ghost illustrations. She is the creator of the quarterly zine ‘Tell the Bees’ a catalogue of tales from folklore, fiction and history. Each zine is themed from Folklore in Film to Britain’s Weirdest ghosts. She also creates detailed maps and zines of geographical areas illustrated with local folklore, ghost stories and strange places which have been featured on the BBC and The Week Junior.

Artist Bio:

Sian Ellis is a Sheffield-based illustrator and mural artist known for her bold, playful, and highly distinctive visual style. A self-taught artist who describes herself as “just a northern lass who hasn’t stopped drawing and painting for 30 years,” Ellis has built a vibrant career producing illustrations, murals, and graphic artwork for businesses, organisations, and creative spaces across the United Kingdom.

Her client list includes well-known names such as Barker and Stonehouse, Brewpoint Brewery, Jersey Zoo, Whirlow Hall Farm, Yellow Arch Studios, and Pieminister. Through these collaborations she has created a wide range of commissioned works, including mural paintings, window displays, event posters, article illustrations, flyers, social media graphics, book illustrations, and illustrated signage.

Ellis’s work is characterised by strong lines, intricate hand-drawn details, and vibrant digital colouring. Her pieces often combine humour, storytelling, and a lively sense of character, resulting in artworks that are both visually striking and immediately recognisable.

Alongside her commissioned work, Ellis also produces a collection of artist prints, jewellery, and small objects d’art. Each design begins as a hand-drawn illustration—often rendered in meticulous detail—before being digitally coloured and prepared for print. These works are available through her online shop and at independent markets and stockists across the UK.

Ellis remains enthusiastic about new commissions and collaborations, and welcomes enquiries from individuals, businesses, and organisations interested in creating bold and playful visual projects.

Curated & Hosted By:

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Nocturnes, Symphonies & Seances: Whistler’s Life & Art—Antony Clayton (Zoom)

Painter, printmaker, teacher, critic, polemicist, flamboyant dandy, acerbic wit, ebullient self-publicist, irascible litigant and a serious artist of considerable refinement, James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) was one of the most controversial figures in the London art world of the late-Victorian period. This talk coincides with the first major European retrospective of Whistler’s work in 30 years, which is on at Tate Britain from 21 May to 27 September.

Educated in the Parisian studio of Charles Gleyre and influenced by Japanese art and design, Whistler spent many of his most productive years in Chelsea, capturing crepuscular atmospheric effects on the Thames and producing some of his most memorable portraits. His distinctive Nocturnes, Arrangements, Symphonies and Harmonies verged on abstraction and challenged the orthodox Victorian belief in the primacy of subject matter, so much so, that John Ruskin famously accused him of, “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”. Many writers of the time, such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, were fascinated by his work, although he often fell out with friends and admirers.

This talk will outline Whistler’s life and work and also address his interest in Spiritualism and similar phenomena such as séances, spirit rapping, table turning and mesmerism. Having once ‘talked’ to a dead American cousin, Whistler wished to communicate with long-dead painters in the hope of learning their secrets, using his muse and lover Joanna Hiffernan as a medium.

About the Speaker

Antony Clayton is the author of Subterranean City: Beneath the Streets of London (2000), London’s Coffee Houses, a Stimulating Story (2003), Decadent London (2005), The Folklore of London (2008) and Secret Tunnels of England, Folklore & Fact (2015). He also co-edited (with Phil Baker) and contributed to Lord of Strange Deaths: the Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer (2015) and wrote Netherwood: Last Resort of Aleister Crowley (2012), which also featured contributions from David Tibet, Gary Lachman and Andy Sharp. His latest book is Mansion of Gloom: the Unsettling Legacy of Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (Accumulator Press, 2024). This is the third talk Antony has given for the Viktor Wynd Museum.

Your curator and host for this event will be the author Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is All the Fear of the Fair (pub. Oct 2025) the second antholoigy he’s edited for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

[Image: Nocturne: Blue and Gold by James McNeill Whistler. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.]

Different Perspectives in Art – Mariska Beekenkamp-Wladimiroff – Zoom

Different Perspectives in Art

The Renaissance is often hailed as the turning point in art history. The moment lineair perspective was truly understood in Western Art, leading to new heights in artist’s achievements. However, what if lineair perspective is not the holy grail?

Join us as we discuss the many different perspectives used by artists throughout art history. We will look at one point perspective, multiple point perspective, continuing perspective, reverse perspective (inverted perspective), the 4th dimension and other ways to look at or experience the space in a work of art. Art works from different moments in times will be chosen, focussing on Western European art although references will be made to other regions in the world.

Speaker Bio:

Mariska Beekenkamp-Wladimiroff read Social Psychology at the University of Amsterdam before returning to university to do an MA in Netherlandish Art at the Courtauld in London. Organizing and presenting live, online, and recorded cultural events for her own organisation Art Historical London, she also partners with other interesting platforms across the globe. She is passionate about educational causes and supports a number in her free time. Always on the move Mariska splits her time between Amsterdam and London.

Curated & Hosted by:

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Symbolism in Art: Geometrical shapes – Mariska Beekenkamp-Wladimiroff – Zoom

Symbolism in Art: Geometrical shapes

As centuries passed, a language of symbols developed so that artists could tell stories with deeper and more intricate emphasis, instantly understandable for an audience which did not always share the same spoken language and which was often illiterate.

Ascribing symbolic and sacred meaning to certain geometric shapes and proportions has been in used since ancient times, across many cultures. Even though many of these symbols are still in use today, modern audiences have lost the ability to recognize and read them. In this lecture we will discuss shapes which have played an important role in European arts.

Speaker Bio:

Curated & Hosted by:

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Myths and Possibilities: Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder – Mariska Beekenkamp-Wladimiroff – Zoom

Myths and Possibilities: Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder

This lecture delves into the fertile borderlands between reality and imagination in European art. Focusing on the period that bridges the late Middle Ages and the dawn of the Early Modern era, we will consider how artists used visual invention to explore the unknown, the wondrous, and the impossible.

At the center of our discussion stand Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder — painters whose fantastical landscapes, hybrid creatures, and teeming moral allegories continue to puzzle and fascinate viewers today. Their works conjure dreamlike realms filled with spiritual anxieties, earthly pleasures, and surreal visions that defy logical explanation. Yet these images did not arise in isolation. They are deeply rooted in medieval visual culture, from illuminated manuscripts and marginalia to theatre, folklore, and religious storytelling traditions that blurred the lines between the sacred and the strange.

Join us as we trace how these traditions shaped the visual culture of the time.

Speaker Bio:

Curated & Hosted by:

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Hexentexte – Professor Patricia Allmer – Zoom

Hexentexte

This talk by internationally renowned scholar of Surrealism Professor Patricia Allmer will discuss the significance of witches and witchcraft in post-war surrealist art by Germanophone women artists. Focussing on how and why women artists adopted, transformed, and re-assigned magical and ritual practices into aesthetic styles, forms, and systems, the talk will explore a range of specific works by artists including the Swiss Meret Oppenheim, the Austrians Renate Bertlmann and Birgit Jürgenssen, and the Germans Valeska Gert, Ursula, and Unica Zürn (whose first publication, a collection of drawings and anagram-poems, was titled Hexentexte or Witches’ Writings). In these works, prominent elements of the traditions of arcane knowledge and performance long associated with witchery combine with, and are transformed by, innovative surrealist techniques and strategies of representation to construct new and subversive kinds of art, repurposing myths and tales from the deep folk histories of central Europe to offer a radical commentary on the experiences of modern women.

Speaker’s Bio

Patricia Allmer is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh. Her many books, exhibitions, and essays have transformed the study of modern and contemporary women artists and surrealism, starting in 2009 with her curation of the award-winning Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism at Manchester Art Gallery, the first major exhibition on this topic. Her contribution to art history and her long-term international scholarly impact on the study of women artists and surrealism have been recognised by awards including a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2010) and an Association for Art History Fellowship (2023). Her books include Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond (2016) and The Traumatic Surreal (2022), hailed in its Woman’s Art Journal review as “groundbreaking”, offering “new perspectives on female positions and lineages in the history of surrealism”. Her co-curated 2024-25 Henry Moore Institute exhibition The Traumatic Surreal is inspired by and based on this book. Professor Allmer is also a major international scholar of René Magritte, publishing three books on the artist, and delivering the prestigious 2017-18 International Émile Bernheim Programme lectures in Brussels on his work.

Hosted & Curated by

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Madness and Decadence in the 1890s – a Zoom talk with Nick Freeman

‘Then in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic Church; or if they did I have forgotten.’

So said W.B. Yeats in 1936, looking back at what he termed ‘the tragic generation’, the writers and artists he had known forty years earlier. His claim is a handy checklist of decadent attributes, but its rhetorical panache disguises the creative achievements and human tragedies of that time.

This talk examines the ways in which madness shaped and haunted English decadence during the 1890s and afterwards, looking at such intriguing characters such as the poets John Barlas and Arthur Symons, and the painter Charles Conder, all of whom experienced incarceration in asylums. It will investigate why madness seems to be so central to the decadent world-view and considers some of the ways in which iit continues to shape our response to creative visionaries.

About the Speaker

Nick Freeman teaches English at Loughborough University. He has published widely on decadence, the supernatural and the occult and has also edited a selection of A.M. Burrage’s ghost stories for the British Library’s Gilded Nightmares series.

Your curator and host for this event will be the author Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is All the Fear of the Fair (pub. Oct 2025) for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

[Image: An absinthe addict eyeing three glasses on a table; advertisement for film Absinthe. Colour lithograph, ca. 1913. Source: Wellcome Collection.]

Exploring Angela Carter’s Gothic Side – a Zoom talk with Dr. Jacob Huntley

The English author Angela Carter (1940–1992) was known for her richly imaginative and subversive writing, which blended elements of feminism, magic realism, and Gothic. She is particularly celebrated for her postmodern reworkings of traditional folk and fairy tales, most notably in The Bloody Chamber (1979), a collection of dark, sensual stories that reimagine classic stories through a feminist lens. Her later novel Nights at the Circus (1984) gives us the story of Fevvers, a winged aerialist whose ambiguous nature blurs the line between myth and reality.

Carter’s work frequently explores the uncanny by revealing the latent violence and sexuality beneath familiar narratives. Her stories challenge conventional notions of gender and power, transforming archetypal characters into complex, often ambiguous figures. Through her vivid prose and radical reinterpretations, Carter reshaped the boundaries of fantasy and folklore in modern literature. This illustrated Zoom talk will explore these darker aspects of her writing.

Your speaker for this event will be Dr Jacob Huntley, a Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. His research interests include the Gothic tradition, horror fiction, and the evolution of the ghost story. Jacob’s Zoom lecture will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

Your curator and host is the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country (2019). Ghostland, a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is Eerie East Anglia (2024), part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

My Dad Made a Monster: Family, Film & Fandom—a Zoom talk with Richard Hand

‘My father, Peter Hand, who passed away in 2024, was Head of Modelling at MGM in Borehamwood during the 1950s and ’60s,’ says Richard Hand. ‘He worked on a number of movies and built the various scale models – and the “man-in-suit” versions – for Gorgo (1961), Britain’s B-movie answer to Godzilla, after which he left the film industry. Before he died, he published his memoirs, A Spear Carrier in Search of a Role (2021), and they offer a fascinating, first-hand glimpse into a neglected corner of film history: the model studio.

‘Remarkably, I didn’t even know about my father’s work on Gorgo until years later. He was never interested in horror or pop culture, so while my older brother and I were obsessively building glow-in-the-dark Aurora monster kits, collecting issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland, and making our own scare attractions and Super-8 horror epics, I had no idea about my father’s dark cinematic secret… One day, my brother turned to me and said, “Did you know our dad actually made a monster?” I didn’t believe him, but it was completely true – and it changed the way I thought about our family and about the culture we grew up loving.

‘This talk reflects on my father’s story and the unexpected intersections of family memory, horror fandom, and lost film craftsmanship.Drawing on his memoirs and my own memories, I’ll explore how model work like his has been largely written out of official film histories, even as the monster he helped design and build – and others like it – have gone on to become cult icons. I’ll also consider how this story connects to wider patterns of horror fandom and culture: from model kit mania and magazines to the music of Frank Zappa, who in songs such as ‘Cheepnis’ famously celebrated low-budget monster movies.’

Richard J. Hand is Professor of Media Practice and Head of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He has a particular interest in historical forms of popular culture, especially horror, and is the author of two books on horror radio drama; the co-author (with Michael Wilson) of four books on Grand-Guignol horror theatre; the co-editor (with Jay McRoy) of two volumes on gothic/horror cinema; and the co-editor (with Mark O’Thomas) of a collection of essays on American Horror Story. As well as an academic, he is a theatre director and award-winning radio writer, including as lead dramatist for the National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre on the Air podcast drama which, in 2020, was archived by the Library of Congress for its ‘historical and cultural significance’.

Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country (2019). Ghostland, a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is Eerie East Anglia (pub. Aug 2024), part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

[Image: an adapted film promo poster for the 1961 British sci-fi movie Gorgo.]

William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love – a Zoom talk with Philip Hoare

Visionary. Poet. Revolutionary. Mystic.

William Blake, much misunderstood in his own time, has been the inspiration for generations of artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians drawn to his radical vision of absolute freedom. Blake’s work spans the worldly and the spiritual, merging humanity, nature, and the divine in fantastical ways.

Award-winning author Philip Hoare’s powerful new book, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love (pub. April 2025), shines the spotlight back onto Blake, reminding us that art still possesses the power to inspire and transform. Philip finds echoes of Blake’s visionary genius in artists including Paul Nash and Derek Jarman, in the weird fiction of Algernon Blackwood, and in the poetry of W. B. Yeats.

So, throw off your “mind-forg’d manacles” and join us to learn about one of England’s most remarkable and revolutionary 18th-/19th-century artists, in this illustrated online Zoom lecture (which will be followed by an audience Q&A session) from one of our finest contemporary writers.

Philip Hoare is the author of nine books of non-fiction, including biographies of Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde, and England’s Lost Eden (2005), about religious mania in the late-Victorian New Forest. Leviathan or, The Whale (2008) won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction and was followed by: The Sea Inside (2013); RisingTideFallingStar (2017), a literary love letter to David Bowie; and Albert and the Whale (2021), about the artist Albrecht Dürer. An experienced broadcaster and curator, Philip wrote and presented the BBC Arena programme The Hunt for Moby-Dick, directed three films for the BBC’s Whale Night, and organised The Moby-Dick and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Big Reads.