WOWI

WOWI is an acronym for What Once Was Imagined, a reference to William Blake’s proverb ‘What is now proved was once only imagined’, and the title of a beautiful exhibition at the Royal College of General Practitioners. There are 28 exhibits and it opened on the 28th of November, William Blake’s birthday, but I don’t think that was part of the plan, just a happy and auspicious coincidence. Continue reading “WOWI”

Frames of reference

West Sussex Sunday

We started from Sheepwash Lane, beside the cricket pitch in East Lavant, north of Chichester and followed the path by Manor Farm to where it borders the River Lavant. This was over a month ago, still officially spring but the sun shone like summer and cow parsley showed us the way. Continue reading “West Sussex Sunday”

Frames of reference

Thesis & Antithesis

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This might be a curio best forgotten, an embarrassing piece of juvenilia. Forty years ago this was my final year thesis at art school. Nowadays it would be called a dissertation. But really it was just an annotated photo album. I’d found a stripey beach towel which became a sort of security blanket for a while, it seemed emblematic of the striped abstract paintings I was making and I photographed it wherever I went. I put all the photos together in a book with lots of random quotes as if I’d swallowed a library, or more likely the Whole Earth Catalog and An Index Of Possibilities. It was all very 1970s and very pretentious, but what really strikes me today is how much it resembles a prototype blog post. Continue reading “Thesis & Antithesis”

Frames of reference

Château La Coste

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Château la Coste is a vineyard 15km north of Aix-en-Provence which, since 2004, has become home to a remarkable collection of art and architecture. Signs have been kept to a minimum and the entrance was not immediately obvious, but we eventually found our way to the elegant, new art centre designed by Tadao Ando and emerged alongside Crouching Spider by Louise Bourgeois. Continue reading “Château La Coste”

Frames of reference