Kingsmead Eyes at the V&A Museum of Childhood

An exhibition of photographs from a dynamic photographic collaboration that will go on display at the V&A Museum of Childhood from 7 November 2009

This week's exhibition previews

Channel, Southampton

While the Millais Gallery at Southampton Solent University searches for new premises (its existing site having been given over to lecture rooms due to swelling student numbers), the gallery staff continue to provide cutting-edge projects in unexpected locations. The new exhibition focuses on the Channel, that notorious stretch of water between the city and France that has been an inspiration to cultural aesthetes over the ages. Contemporary artists including Andrew Cross, Susan Collins, Peter Collis and Rosie Maguire join forces to provide an idiosyncratic vision of this watery throroughfare, ruminating on the poetry, paintings and songs it has inspired over the years.

Sir James Matthew Building, to 30 Jan

Jessica Lack

The House Of Fairy Tales, Walsall

Founded by artists Gavin Turk and Deborah Curtis, The House Of Fairy Tales is a community arts group that wears its extraordinariness on its florid sleeve. With an agenda of conjuring "child-centred art for all ages" the project traces its cultural heritage back to the Mexican Day Of The Dead as much as to surrealism. Its showy list of collaborators includes Dexter Dalwood, Sir Peter Blake, Rachel Whiteread, Jeremy Deller, Fiona Banner, Adam Dant and Cornelia Parker as well as the less obviously arty Dead Victorians, Visitors From Another Dimension, Madame de La Cartomancer, Lonesome Cowboys From Hell, and the Snake Lady. Here the Fairy Tale hosts come to haunt the Garman Ryan Collection.

New Art Gallery, to 16 Oct 2010

Robert Clark

RCA Secret 2009, London

Bargain hunters get the opportunity to make a killing this week as the Royal College Of Art's Secret comes around again. This annual show invites illustrious ex-alumni and other artist well-wishers to paint on postcards, which are then sold in aid of the RCA Fine Art Student Award Fund. There is, of course, a catch. Each artwork is signed on the back, and buyers are kept in the dark about who has made the work until they've shelled out. But at £40 a pop, it's worth the risk, and those lucky enough to nab a YBA should be very pleased with themselves; a Peter Doig postcard was recently sold at Sotheby's for £42,000. Just don't forget your sleeping bag if you want to be first in line.

Royal College Of Art, SW7, exhibition Fri to 20 Nov, sale 21 Nov

Jessica Lack

Ghosts Of Winter Hill, Manchester

This exhibition will mark the momentous media occasion of the switchover of the Granada region's Winter Hill transmitter from analogue to digital TV. Subtitled Manchester, Television And The City, Ghosts Of Winter Hill celebrates the city's claim to having a historical UK TV profile second only to the capital's. While it might be argued that the more innovative and influential cultural identity of dear old Madchester was created in downtown counter-cultural haunts such as the sadly defunct Haçienda, this display focuses on what the mums and dads were watching on the box back home: Coronation Street, The Comedians and Top Of The Pops.

Urbis, to 30 Apr

Robert Clark

Goh Ideta, Newcastle upon Tyne

The Japanese artist Goh Ideta creates seductive sculptural contraptions into which visitors are invited to enter, interact with or "bat about" in, as Ideta himself puts it. For this show, presented as part of the Wunderbar festival of performance and interactive art, Ideta promises to transform the gallery into a glimmering 3-D mosaic of mirrored lights. As in any Ideta installation, it is the visitor's own movements that complete the work's captivating aesthetic, as light rays are activated by mirrored tiles set into the cushioned gallery floor. Tactics of fairground amusement are elevated at the service of artistic enchantment.

Vane, to 28 Nov

Robert Clark

Robert Crumb Uncovered, London

Robert Crumb was once considered to be a creepy comics casualty slavered over by nerds, but now – thanks to several high-profile exhibitions in "established" museums and the anointing of art historian Robert Hughes (who described him as "the Bruegel of our time", yes really) – Crumb has become one of the foremost commentators on the inherent weirdness of America. What he offers up through his work is a pretty rancid vision of the American dream, a catalogue of bizarre sexual fantasies with a flair so am-dram we could be watching some aged magician and his somewhat cruddy assistant sawing a large-bottomed woman in half. Roll up Fritz the Cat, Flakey Foont and Mr Natural, the artist who put the oath in self-loathing is back, bringing with him a cast of freakish aberrations personifying our basest emotions and the craziness of humanity.

Scream Gallery, W1, Thu to 12 Dec

Jessica Lack

J Lawrence Isherwood, Leigh

The north-west of England seems to have produced a host of oddball painters during the dreary post-second world war years; one thinks first and foremost of Salford's LS Lowry, a painter best known for his depictions of matchstick men in industrial districts, but whose less familiar late seascapes and almost perverse girlie fantasies are now recognised as far from provincial. Wigan's JL Isherwood, who died in 1989, never quite achieved Lowry's degree of stubborn, eccentric confidence, but his painterly array of terraced and cobbled backstreets and gurning old blokes, all embodied in a distinctive style of dark and dank impressionism, is utterly persuasive, as this reassessment will hopefully amply demonstrate.

Turnpike Gallery, to 2 Jan

Robert Clark

Bob & Roberts Smith, London

Over the past year Bob & Roberta Smith (AKA art maverick Patrick Brill) has been in residence at Beaconsfield, the lofty south London gallery known for its cutting-edge agenda. As Smith's tenure comes to a close, the space will be given over to a retrospective of his signature bold paintings, featuring odd, seemingly arbitrary sentences in a lo-fi, blocky typeface. All the work exhibited in the three gallery spaces will have been made over the past year, and the pièce de résistance will be Smith's 11-metre long painting called This Artist Is Deeply Dangerous, based on an article written by the Guardian's sports correspondent Steve Bierley about an exhibition he saw of the art of Louise Bourgeois.

Beaconsfield, SE11, Sat to 21 Feb

Jessica Lack

Men at arms

Linda Colley on the neglected 18th-century landscape painter, Paul Sandby

One of the last watercolours on show in this exhibition is of Mr Whatman's Turkey Paper Mills in Kent. Painted by Paul Sandby in 1794, 15 years before his death, it offers a view of the Len valley, near Maidstone, that is at once tranquil and replete with industry, traditional and in flux. A milkmaid is driving her cows down a road, while a stagecoach hurtles along another. There are gentle hills, fertile, enclosed fields, hop gardens and well-established oaks. But in the background are the buildings, machinery and drying lofts of what was then Britain's biggest, most advanced paper mill, depicted "with an almost hallucinatory, microscopic exactness".

This description by John Bonehill, curator of the exhibition, suggests both the immediate appeal of Sandby's art and why it has sometimes met with neglect and condescension. His images can appear wonderfully "realistic" and "true to life". Consequently, they remain highly accessible, and in his own time they were admired, not just in their original form, but also as reproductions in a wide variety of illustrated books and maps, as decorations on ceramics, and even as designs on wallpaper.

In the past, however, this very accessibility and busy versatility have led to Sandby being viewed as little more than a worthy, humdrum forerunner to later, more ambitious and less seemingly literal British landscape artists. If one wanted "real Views from Nature in this Country", declared Thomas Gainsborough in 1764, there was no better artist than Sandby, who frequently "employ'd his pencil that way"; but he himself had other, bigger ideas drawn from the likes of Claude Lorrain. Half a century later, George III employed faint praise no less damningly. Sandby was "never idle", approved the elderly monarch, but could turn his "hand to anything, like a fox" (and it is suggestive perhaps that the comparison was with an animal the king would have viewed as vermin). One of the achievements of this exhibition and its outstanding accompanying catalogue is that they go a considerable way towards rescuing Sandby from this reputation as mere, easily comprehended jobbing artist.

As George III's remark illustrates, this view of him has always been coloured by varieties of snobbery. To this extent, the portrait of Sandby by Francis Cotes, showing him leaning out of a country house window, sketchbook in hand, can be seen as a calculated puff by a close friend. It accurately conveys Sandby's good looks and pleasant temperament. But the portrait gives a flatteringly deceptive impression of a man as much at ease in polite and leisured interiors as he is with nature. In reality, Sandby's family background was considerably more humble than that of Gainsborough or John Constable. Unlike his fellow academician Joshua Reynolds, Sandby was never a fashionable, expensive portrait painter. Nor was he a practitioner of academically prestigious history painting. And, crucially, unlike JMW Turner or Thomas Girtin, Sandby was not a metropolitan.

The son of a framework knitter, he was baptised in Nottingham in 1731; and this exhibition is very much a Nottingham achievement, where it was first displayed. The show, opening today at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, and at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in March, was conceived by Stephen Daniels of Nottingham University. It is exactly the sort of deeply researched and ambitious regional art exhibition that is likely to be rendered increasingly impracticable because of government, municipal and corporate spending cuts.

The constraints on Sandby's own economic circumstances shaped the form and content of his work. There were no "shifts" available to him, he wrote, that could make him "independent"; and, for all his success, his financial situation became increasingly difficult as he aged. So attempting art that was too obviously dissident or uncompromisingly experimental was never an option for him. Instead, Sandby relied for much of his career on a salary from the rulers and agencies of the British state, and he painted accordingly. His first break came in 1747, when he was appointed chief draughtsman to the "compleat and accurate survey of Scotland", which was being carried out by the British army's board of ordnance in the wake of the failed Jacobite rising of 1745-46. For four years, he prepared designs for new bridges and fortifications in the Scottish Highlands, accompanied survey teams over terrain that had recently been a war zone, and drew relief maps of mountains and coastlines, carefully marking out the new "king's roads" in red, the colour of a British soldier's uniform coat.

Like the wonderful images made by the artists who sailed on James Cook's naval expeditions to the Pacific, Sandby's work was thus in part a byproduct of an increasingly assertive and powerful 18th-century British state. His early exposure to things military proved decisive for his artistic development in several respects. Dealing with army men and methods familiarised him with certain techniques of close topographical observation and surveillance: with how to scrutinise and represent the physical distances and relationships between buildings, groups of people and places. His time in Scotland also won him powerful patrons. He probably owed his appointment there to the efforts of his brother and fellow artist Thomas Sandby, who was employed by the Duke of Cumberland, favourite son of George II, and victor or butcher of the battle of Culloden. Certainly, Paul Sandby was able thereafter to enjoy an intermittent connection with members of the royal family, a degree of official recognition confirmed by his appointment in 1768 as chief drawing master at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, a position he retained for almost 30 years.

Soldiers and sailors also populate Sandby's paintings and drawings to an unusual degree, and they are almost always represented sympathetically. Sometimes they feature as guardians of the realm and its internal order. This is the case in his 1778 painting of a military encampment on Warley Common, assembled to repel a possible French invasion; or in his depiction in 1780 of some of the mounted army officers who had helped to crush London's Gordon rioters, and thus – Sandby implies in this image – to safeguard the sort of respectable women and children whom he includes in the foreground. More often, though, he represented men at arms as being thoroughly integrated and at ease with their civilian counterparts, as decent, ordinary chaps who just happen to have taken the king's shilling.

In this regard, Sandby's work documents the shift away from an earlier, widespread suspicion of standing armies towards a more enthusiastic celebration of the nation's armed forces. Thus in a 1770 watercolour of the Henry VIII gateway to Windsor Castle (one of more than 500 images by the Sandby brothers in the royal collection) a redcoat is shown lounging against the castle's ancient walls, chatting easily to two disreputable townsfolk, while the gate itself stands wide open to the street. The artist's intention may have been to suggest that Britain's monarchy was now so securely entrenched as not to require impregnable fortifications or spartanly efficient guards. Even in his sketches of what was in effect an army of occupation and bloody revenge in northern Scotland in the aftermath of the 1745 rebellion, Sandby makes some effort to humanise and legitimise his British military subjects. Individual redcoats are shown cheerfully involving Highlanders in their pastimes; while in a brilliant, impressionistic sketch of the hanging in Edinburgh of John Young, a soldier turned forger, Sandby represents the British army as a force that is willing to discipline its own deviants and not just Jacobite rebels.

Sandby's vision then is substantially (not entirely) loyalist and conventionally patriotic, and this may be another reason why his work is sometimes passed over. Morning, an extraordinary painting of a massive, venerable beech tree set firm in a Shropshire landscape, is, for instance, a powerfully loyalist testament. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1794, five years after the fall of the Bastille and in the midst of war, the painting would have been understood as an allusion to contemporary conservative celebrations of an ancient, organic British constitution as against the recent republican outgrowths of revolutionary France. As the exhibition catalogue argues, Sandby's vision was also increasingly a Britannic one. Like Turner, Sandby made repeated tours throughout Wales and Scotland, representing not just their scenic and cultural differences, but also the ways in which these countries were undergoing change and becoming in some respects far more closely linked with England.

Sandby made his first recorded visit to Wales in 1770, surveying scenes in the north of that country the following year, and then touring south Wales in 1773 in the company of Sir Joseph Banks, the naturalist, amateur scientist and entrepreneurial explorer. The result of these journeys was the publication of XII Views in South Wales in 1775, and the issuing of a further 12 Welsh views the year after. Banks had been a privileged member of Constantine Phipps's expedition to Newfoundland and Labrador in 1766, as well as accompanying Cook on his great Endeavour voyage of 1768-71. His enthusiastic involvement in Sandby's artistic tours underlines the degree to which leisure travel in Wales remained in the early 1770s something of an adventure, and the extent to which the country might still be viewed by English spectators as a distant, quaint, picturesque "other".

Sandby, however, was concerned not just to represent Welsh "difference", but also the degree to which it was receding. He depicted "romantic" landscapes and an abundance of castles. But his views also show "agricultural and commercial activity" and "the circulation of people and goods" between various Welsh sites and other locations, like the movement of river traffic along the Wye at Chepstow. Many of his Scottish landscapes also document and endorse change. In his 1751 sketch of the execution of John Young in Edinburgh, most of the female spectators appear with tartan shawls over their heads (thereby giving the lie to those historians who argue tartan was a later invented tradition). But in his wonderful painting of the ruins of Roslin Castle, Midlothian (c1780), women appear quite differently. Not just Lady Frances Scott and Lady Elliott, who are shown sketching, using the best technical aids, but also the servant and labouring women present are painted in styles of dress that would have been familiar in contemporary London, or Dublin, or any other "polite" and "modern" setting.

It is possible to interpret Sandby's close attention to economic and social change as another manifestation of his loyalism. His eagerness to seek out and commit to paper scenes of "progress" in post-Culloden Scotland, lead mining and pleasure gardens and the like, may for instance point to a belief on his part that a more united Britain will bring forth economic advance and a rise in civility and manners. Yet, in his early career at least, Sandby's attitudes may have been more complex and divided than this exhibition suggests. He was, after all, the son of a provincial artisan. Moreover, for most of his career, he had connections with members of the British armed forces, and the impact of this may not have been straightforward. Protracted exposure to the military, along with his own background, may have worked to sharpen Sandby's gaze.

He certainly reacted with anger to the sight of ordinary soldiers and sailors being cast aside by an ungrateful state. One of his drawings of Windsor shows a plump, haughty cleric pushing aside a demobilised soldier. Another, unpublished, drawing features a onetime Royal Navy sailor down on his luck and forced to sell stockings. The man still looks fit, and has retained what passed in the 1750s for an ordinary seaman's uniform, loose, knee-length trousers and a jerkin. But his face, which gazes directly out from this drawing, is furious with disgust; and, in the background, majesty is being made fun of, as a poor man scrambles on top of an equestrian statue of Charles I.

Like another drawing in this same series, of an attractive, cheerfully entrepreneurial and manifestly unashamed female forger, this image bears witness to the diversity and occasional ambivalence of Sandby's vision. So, possibly, does one of his paintings: View of Windsor on a Rejoicing Night, 1768. The castle rises in the background, one of its towers is backlit by the flames of an enormous bonfire, and some drunken revellers are returning home. This canvas may very well be a depiction of a celebration of a royal anniversary. But the year 1768 also witnessed widespread bonfires in support of the election to Parliament of John Wilkes, the radical activist who was seen by his supporters as championing the rights and liberties of ordinary folk – against the king.

Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain is at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (0131 624 6200), until 7 February 2010.

David Flusfeder: I've been framed

David Flusfeder's Aunt Anne suddenly took up painting in her 50s and he promised to look after her pictures if she became too frail. That time has come, but he didn't expect quite so many ...

About 35 years ago, a day or two after her mother died, my aunt, Anne, was impelled to draw a picture. She didn't know what she was about to draw; the pencil she was holding just moved as if independent of any intention or control. The following day, she drew another. There were similarities between her first two pictures and to the next ones that would follow: both were rudimentary, almost childish, in technique; both were of unknown women's faces; and both had a striking, disquieting power about the eyes.

Anne was in her mid-50s then, and had never shown any aptitude for, or much interest in, art. She was dutifully interested in the church (both Anne and her husband, Richard, had been converts from Judaism to Christianity in their 20s, and were introduced to each other by a priest who was instrumental in their conversions) and had a taste for less orthodox notions such as spiritualism, as well as for detective fiction and the private lives of the Romantic poets. She lived in Reading, where Richard worked in the postal department of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.

Anne was always the best company. I was born in America, but my homesick mother, who was from the East End of London, took me and my sister every year for summer holidays back to England, where we would go with Anne to boarding houses on the south coast. She was a delight to be with, made us laugh with little poems and songs, and was reliably generous with discreetly delivered coins to pay for slot machines on the pier.

After my parents separated, when I was six, we came to live in England, and Anne was an important feature in our lives. She had a mischievous gleam in the eye that had probably been there since she was a child. And she was, and still is (she is 91 now, blind and living in a care home near Newbury), entirely unpretentious about any of her enthusiasms. So when she took up art, when those first pictures led to more, as her style changed and developed, she just wanted to show the work she had made, share her surprise that it had happened and demonstrate how she produced it.

Quite a few times, I sat with her in her living room in Reading. Anne would put on a cassette of some light classical music, half-close her eyes, gently hum along and, usually with pastel on cartridge paper, produce the first swirls of colour. Shapes would emerge, often of faces that, seemingly without any conscious decision-making on her part, sometimes she would work over and sometimes work up. Her own taste tended to sweet pictures of guileless girls, so often she would accentuate the mouth and eyes, as if applying a prettifying lipstick and mascara.

Over time, she produced hundreds and hundreds of pictures. She used charcoal and oil paint as well as pastels, and produced abstracts as well as portraits. Few of her pictures are marked with a date, so it's hard to work out now which style came from which era, but some of them were extraordinarily good and all of them were interesting. A lot of the figures came dressed in archaic clothing, and when she began to exhibit, at galleries in Reading, Henley and Oxford, it wasn't rare for an enthusiastic visitor to declare an uncanny resemblance with a lost ancestor or a known figure from history.

Some of Anne Franklin's admirers claimed that these were "paintings from the other side" – souls caught in limbo, I suppose. Anne, although quietly sympathetic to this point of view, was careful to make no claims herself. She and Richard developed a little cottage industry. She would produce, he would frame; together they were very proud of her achievements, the work that was sold, the two that were accepted at Royal Academy summer shows, the admiring remarks in the comments book. The walls of their flat became filled with her work. Every surface, all of the space beneath furniture, was used to stack up her pictures, which spilled out along the walls of the communal corridor outside their front door.

Fifteen years ago or so, Anne and Richard asked me if I would – I think these were the words they used – "look after the pictures after we're gone". My sister lives abroad, Anne's only other nephew has never been that close to her and, from the beginning, I've always been a supporter of her work. (I wince and blush when I read some of my early and unforgivably pompous remarks in her comments book.) I, of course, promised that I would, without actually thinking ahead to what that might involve.

I'm writing this surrounded by my aunt's paintings. A few weeks ago, the call came from Richard's niece. Anne has been in a care home for the last couple of years. Richard, who has his own health issues, recently went into one as well. His niece, who had volunteered for the unenviable task of clearing out their flat, reminded me of my promise. I drove from London to Reading, and it was all very poignant, going through the nearly emptied rooms of a once cluttered flat. The carpets were gone, leaving cold concrete floors. Richard's most personal belongings had gone with him, and what was left were a few boxes of books, papers and knick-knacks, a vintage radiogram, stacks of chairs and the rest – possessions that might once have been integral to their lives and were going to be given away or sold. And, of course, Anne's pictures.

We carried them down, stack by stack, and used a shopping trolley to transport them from the courtyard of the sheltered housing complex to my car. And then I drove them back to London, the car – the boot, the rear seats, the front passenger seat – filled with them: faces and abstracts, brown and purple and orange, creaking against each other, some broken glass scattered around from where the frames had come apart.

She used to give nicknames to some of them. One was Blackie, another Rembrandt; in the front passenger seat, the Queen of Sheba looked at me with the sort of gaze that made Anne's enthusiasts think these objects were in possession of some kind of hidden knowledge. On the motorway, I tried to remember if it was Blackie or the Queen of Sheba who had the hair in which Anne was sure you could detect the face of John Lennon.

I work in a pleasantly shabby room, where I choose to have hardly any pictures on display, because I resist any visual or sensory influence to deflect me from writing. Now I have many hundreds. And a major task awaits. These pictures are going to smear and spoil unless I remove them all from their frames, spray their surfaces with fixative and store them away somewhere between acid-free tissue paper. Until I do that, they'll remain behind me, waiting for attention (a picture, like a story or a song, doesn't really exist unless someone is paying attention to it), or awaiting the gallery or art angel who will offer to store them in perfect conditions.

After I got back from Reading, I visited a friend who lives round the corner. I told him what I'd been doing and about the car filled with paintings waiting to be unloaded. "Just wait until she dies and then torch them," he helpfully said.

Really? Is that what people might do? And in that case, why would I have to wait until she dies? Patiently, as if to a moral simpleton, he explained that I had promised to take charge of her pictures after she was dead, so only then would I be within my rights to destroy them. I thanked him for his advice, and then asked a different friend to help carry the pictures into my workroom.

There are two issues here: one is that I like Anne's pictures. I've always been impressed by anything that is made that exerts a power, especially if there is a mystery to it. These pictures deserve to be looked after and they deserve to be seen. I had been expecting, when surrounded by so many, that my liking for them would be reduced, but the opposite has turned out to be true: in the company of so many of them, I like each one more.

And I gave my word. Maybe it's partly that I'm paying her back for her friendship to my mother and to me and my sister, the love she gave along with the surreptitious coins for trips to the slot-machine arcades on the seaside piers in family holidays. Not much sustains, but a promise is a promise.

Career by numbers: Architect

£40,000 Average earnings for a sole principal architect with a small firm

£55,000 Average earnings for a principal architect in a partnership

£60,500 Average earnings for a private, in-house architect

7 Number of years of combined study and training required to become a registered architect

950 Average number of graduates who register each year

13,500 Students currently on UK architecture courses (most still go on to work in architecture-related fields even if they don't register)

44% work in private practice

29% are principals in partnership

12% are sole principals

9% work in the public sector

6% work as private, in-house architects

Percentage split 80% of architects are male, and just 20% are female

Percentage who are female

Sources: The Fees Bureau; RIBA