For William Turnbull

I treasure this little booklet. It’s a catalogue from Waddington Galleries in 1981, a souvenir of a beautiful and influential little exhibition of small bronzes. It got me looking at Brancusi and Giacometti and prompted countless visits to the British Museum where I discovered Cycladic figurines and Bronze Age beaker pots, Elgin marbles and Benin bronzes and much more. William Turnbull’s work seemed to contain all the best bits, all distilled from seeds gathered from around the world and filtered through his hands. Continue reading “For William Turnbull”

Frames of reference

Cork By Cork

Conrad Engelhardt makes mosaics from used wine corks. He brings them to us at The Rowley Gallery for framing. Now he has sent us this little video to show how they are made. There is a lot of arranging and rearranging involved, trying out different combinations, it must have seemed a logical progression to record the process by stop motion animation. See also our earlier post What A Corker! The piece featured there is now on display at Lutyens in Fleet Street.

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From Eggardon Hill & Pilsdon Pen

The four landscape paintings on exhibition at The Rowley Gallery were committed to 200gsm acid-free paper using artist’s watercolours and gouache from the peaks of Eggardon Hill and Pilsdon Pen in north west Dorset. Pilsdon is Dorset’s highest hill, and closely associated with the legend of the screaming skull at Bettiscombe Manor, down there in the Marshwood Vale. For many years the skull in question was believed to be that of an African servant girl of the 18th century. Under recent analysis it was proved to be the skull of a young girl of the late Neolithic, circa 4,000 BC. This is close to the vintage of the ancient shaped hills and sacred landscapes of Dorset – stone circles, burrows, tumps, burial sites, excarnation sites, and later fashioned as fortresses raised against the worsening weather and tribal pomp of the Iron Age. All are studded with human, animal and ritual remains in their steep, deeply dug chalk banks. Continue reading “From Eggardon Hill & Pilsdon Pen”

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Hojas De Otoño

Autumn leaves in the Jardin de Principe in Aranjuez, Spain. We were driving from Madrid to Toledo and stopped here for lunch and a walk in the park. This garden and the adjacent Jardin de la Isla were laid out around the royal palace of Philip II in the 16th century, 200 years before the present town was built. They became the inspiration in 1939 for the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo. Continue reading “Hojas De Otoño”

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Keats Leaves

A walk on Hampstead Heath and the amazement of finding myself suddenly in the middle of another autumn produced the new series of prints. Actually it is not a new series. The new prints became part of the Regency series. After all these years I still find surprising the way prints create themselves almost without my help. Continue reading “Keats Leaves”

Frames of reference