Welcome to my blog!
My name is Nigel Ip. I am a visual arts blogger with a passion for art history and curating. My ultimate aim is to make art history and the appreciation of art more accessible and understandable for the general public (pulling it out of academia, one may say). I also love food.
I graduated with a Distinction in MA History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art. I wrote my dissertation on Raphael (the ‘School of Athens’ guy) and subsequently won an Outstanding Dissertation Prize; it was written entirely at the local cafe. I currently volunteer at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, cataloguing ship portraits and am also a visitor assistant at the Natural History Museum, London.
Prior to that, I studied BA History & Philosophy of Art at the University of Kent with a dissertation on ‘Selfies and Self-Portraiture‘ (yes, I discussed selfies academically). Rumour has it I still haunt the campus and its library. This blog was born halfway through my first year there. Canterbury Cathedral was my casual walk-in spot.
I am a really big art nerd with an equally large number of (growing) art books. A ‘favourite artist’ does not exist; there are simply (too) many. I will happily love a Rembrandt, an Artemisia Gentileschi, Henri Matisse and Claude Monet (of course), William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, Picasso’s Classical period, Mark Rothko, the odd bit of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, and even the easy-to-hate William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Italian Renaissance and Baroque art goes without saying.
My nerdism is conveniently expressed by my dedicated bookshelves at home:
- Italian Renaissance art (obviously)
- Raphael
- Pre-Raphaelites and Victorian art
- Drawings and prints
- Aesthetics and art theory
- Portraiture
Whilst paintings and sculpture are cool and everything, my true loves are drawings, prints, frescoes and tapestries!
Welcome to the world of an art nerd!
You can follow me on Instagram too!
