January is the cruellest month. TS Eliot was wrong. A full 31 days with the sad tinsel of Christmas a departing memory in the winter darkness and February stretching rigidly before you. Even willing yourself to go out for a walk can sometimes feel heroic. This year’s cultural diet, rapidly becoming a tradition for Observer readers, will speed you on your way.
Here is a work of art for every day of the month – to lift your spirits, shift your mood, deepen your thinking. Everything here reaches the mind and heart through the eyes. And some of it does so with fast-acting effects. Painting, surely the most open and immediate of all art forms, offers itself so instantaneously. You have the sense of it straight away, even backlit on a glowing screen. Some of the images here are so small, in fact, that you can look at them without any loss of scale while out on that walk with your smartphone.
