Charleston Farmhouse 1981

This is a beautiful little book of photographs taken by Kim Marsland at Charleston Farmhouse in 1981. The Bloomsbury Group had left and the Charleston Trust were yet to take over; it was a house in flux, a time capsule captured in these evocative pictures. Kim Marsland was then a student at Maidstone College of Art, which was where I’d studied until six years earlier. I’d painted the front door of our little house in red and green chevrons and furnished it with cheap second-hand furniture decorated with painted designs, and covered the walls with hand-printed wallpaper. But I’d not heard of Charleston. I think few of us had in those days. Kim Marsland’s photographs recall an intimate time before Charleston’s domestic decorations became an internationally recognised style. Continue reading “Charleston Farmhouse 1981”

Frames of reference

Eight Frames For Jonathan Christie

The Red-Sailed Ships: Stiffkey

We recently got a nice job at The Rowley Gallery. Jonathan Christie asked us to make picture frames for a group of eight paintings he’d been invited to show with St Jude’s next month, in an exhibition called Airs, Reels & Ballads at The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh. Continue reading “Eight Frames For Jonathan Christie”

Frames of reference

Another Walk In The Woods

Shepherd’s Cottage was a surprisingly elusive place for a rendezvous. I thought I knew where it was, just off the road by Staverton Thicks, the rambling old woods we’d visited a couple of times before. I knew it as Thicks Cottage, but I thought that was just another name for the same place. So when we arrived on the doorstep a bemused woodsman put us right. “The Shepherd’s Cottage is back up where you’ve just come, then left along the track. Careful though, it can be a bit sandy down at the bottom.” Continue reading “Another Walk In The Woods”

Frames of reference

On The Beach

Every morning at breakfast, we watched from our terrace on top of the hill, as planes took off from
the parachute school down below and climbed up into the sky to expel their students high above the breaking waves of Laurosu Beach. So one morning, after breakfast, we came down for a closer look. Continue reading “On The Beach”

Frames of reference