Gaby Wood

In the Brazilian countryside, a man is driving in the wrong direction. It’s 1977, and he’s been on the road for three days. As his yellow Volkswagen Beetle pulls into a remote petrol station, we see what he is about to encounter: a dead body on the ground, crudely covered with cardboard.

Wagner Moura, playing the driver, clocks the body and attempts to reverse before the...

As​ a boy, the Romanian-born artist Avigdor Arikha spent part of the Second World War in a labour camp in western Ukraine, where he was given a small sketchbook and pencil by a sympathetic soldier. A German-speaking Jew, he had been deported with his family; his father had died on the way. The camp at Mogilev-Podolsky was in a destroyed Transnistrian foundry put to use by Siegfried...

In a sense, Lucian Freud wasn’t really a printmaker at all. He was a gambler. The appeal of etching was that it allowed him to leave a great deal to chance.

Jane Eyre, a series of large-scale lithographs made by Paula Rego in 2001, begins with two images based on the novel’s first scene. Girl Reading at Window is a more or less direct illustration of events, sequential moments laid out on a single page like a storyboard or graphic novel. Loving Bewick, the second image, is different. Its subject is what happens at that point in Jane’s...

Before my appointment​ with the albatross, I’d planned to draw it differently. We first met through glass: the skeleton was in a cabinet in the museum, displayed on a high shelf. If you looked up and dodged the reflections you could see the curved sweep of its beak and the Z-shaped slashes of its vast folded wings. Diomedea exulans, the wandering albatross, was an improbable bird,...