TED HUGHES said that deadlines were good for artists and journos as its imminent arrival provokes fear and therefore adrenalin — and we get on with it. And so, herewith my 12 deadlines for 2024.  

The partridge in the pear tree, if you like, was The Flea at Hackney’s Yard Theatre, a vivid production about old hypocrisies. “The poor have got their channels in the bedrooms of the rich.” My pieces need a good haiku of a title and editorial provides them.  

The delicious and deceptively mysterious painter “Here Comes the Sun King” on Ken Kiff’s Show, then Peter Kennard’s Archive of Dissent at the Whitechapel Gallery London (on till January 19) which made me hail him in print as the “artist of the human conscience.” 

Henry Orlik in the summer felt like the five gold rings — a surrealist painter I’d never heard of as he’d eschewed fame and all that went with it — including money, apparently, until he needed some and his sublime canvases were shown in a Mayfair Gallery.

Brecht’s collages at Raven Row reminded us of the wit, profundity and direct political truths of the man, along with the body language of fascism. A wonderful show of art and photography of deep humanity. 

When the Grapes were Sour by Palestinian Rasha al-Jundi was an honour to review at P21 Gallery, that vital cultural institution for Palestinian culture in Euston. In February the sublime (and now late) Frank Auerbach’s Charcoal Heads at the Courtauld: “Down and dirty with charcoal, stuff from burnt trees, trees that could have been from the forests of northern Europe where so much awful stuff happened, he gropes for the essence of a person.” Reviewing means being edited and I’d like to thank my editor for the insight “spirit in the mass,” about the group of painters that Auerbach communed with.  

Musical theatre in spring — In Clay  — about making art (and so much more) at that interesting theatre, Upstairs at the Gatehouse. A review of Hilary Mantel’s Memoir of my Former Self was high-calorific brain food and this post-humous collection of her journalism reads like literature. What a writer she was — anyone watching The Mirror and the Light? 

Lords a leaping. That’s the last 12 days reference, I promise.  

Satisfying too, to write my own preview piece for a project I’d started The Shape Of A Pocket honouring the late John Berger, that polymathic creator best know for Ways of Seeing that changed the way we look at art forever. Then the review of an enterprise — Riversmeet, that quiet powerhouse of arts production based in Devon. 

When asked to do this piece on my year’s reviewing I thought it an opportunity to explore how this nourished my own stuff. Playwrights should review plays — writers books, painters exhibitions and so on. When I hung my first show last week I saw a bit of Kiff in there — and wasn’t that a sludge of Auerbach’s burnt umber? Some Brechtian or Kennardian collage? I see that landscape, Nowhere Really, is in the colours of the Palestinian flag. Doug Nicholl’s poetry and the Riversmeet output remind me that all art is political but not, if it’s good, didactic. Brecht knew that. 

In these uncertain times there is still plenty of art to comfort, inspire, encourage and enjoy. Good art shows us how the world works and, as the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim explained through his famous book Uses of Enchantment, it makes us think what we might do if we project ourselves into that situation.

Jan Woolf’s exhibition Landscape at Play is at the Tavistock Gallery, 120 Belsize Park, London NW3 5BA until December 31.