Working Mum: The arty battleground has shifted to breakfast

GUEST BLOG

By Tabitha Ronson

First it was impossibly creative lunches. Mums with way too much time on their hands creating elaborate lunchbox artworks.

Sandwiches shaped like cartoon characters, animals, iconic buildings; salad and vegetables carved to resemble fauna and flora; food patched and pieced together to resemble colourful miniature works of art.

Art: How Turner squared up to the oblong tendency

Late Turner: Painting Set Free
Tate Britain

For the longest time pictures were brick-shaped. Photographs in an album and portraits on the wall were often pre-figured to the Golden Ratio, that pleasing aspect that had mathematical as well as aesthetic qualities.

Art: Clare Woods on her commission for London's river services

Cranky and Idler may sound like sneaky nicknames for your deadwood colleagues but in the hands of artist Clare Woods, they are shimmering takes on the River Thames.

Exhibition: Lowry And The Painting Of Modern Life, Tate Britain

Laurence S Lowry painted football matches. He painted evictions, and men at work and magnetised huddles around a suicide in the street.

Little wonder then that his work was popular and that popularity - as usual - was a double-edged sword, bringing him affection among "his" people and a derision and dismissal among the critics.