Cutting It Fine

Cutting It Fine: The Art of the British Wood Engraver is an exhibition at Salisbury Museum, showcasing works by twenty-one of the leading British wood engravers of the last hundred years. All the prints are on loan from a single private collection. They include Gwen Raverat, Eric Ravilious, John Nash, Paul Nash, Leon Underwood, Rachel Reckitt, Gertrude Hermes, Monica Poole, Anne Desmet and Neil Bousfield. Continue reading “Cutting It Fine”

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From Ayot St Lawrence (Again)

Earlier this year (it was April, a week after we’d walked from Aspenden), and a walk that went unrecorded, in waybegone daze, that seems more like eight years ago now than just eight months. How can one year feel like so many more? We’d returned to Ayot St Lawrence again, but this time we’d been spun off in a different direction to last time. Continue reading “From Ayot St Lawrence (Again)”

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These Paintings Are Of Themselves

I am grateful to James Kalm for giving us a private view of this Brice Marden exhibition of new work in New York. I love it. I love these beautiful, shaky, trembling, late paintings. To look at them is to unravel them, to see how they were made, and witness the hand that painted them. These paintings are of themselves, but also of everything else. They’re calligraphies written with hand-held branches, they’re a web of tree-top canopies, they’re the mycorrhizal networks in the forest floor, they’re the internet cables that connect us and separate us, that tie us together and keep us apart, they’re the vessels that run through our bodies. They’re survivors of a world that is fast disappearing, they’re reminders of why we are here. Thank you Brice.

These paintings are of themselves

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In Siracusa

Long ago and far away. 2018, in the back streets of Ortigia. Before Brexit and before Covid, when holidays were not so unusual. I’m looking back at old photos as a kind of vicarious vacation, an escape from our day to day to yesterday. We’d been here for a couple of weeks, exploring the island and the countryside round about. On this day we walked from Ortigia back into mainland Siracusa to discover the Latomia dei Cappuccini and the Catacombs of San Giovanni. Continue reading “In Siracusa”

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The Life Breath Song

A wee film poem nature song. I found this over at Caught By The River. Kathleen Jamie asked the Scottish public to submit lines for a communal poem. She received hundreds and hundreds and knitted them together with help from the Scottish Poetry Library into three films. This is one of them.

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Half An Alphabet

David Hollington’s Florilegium continues in the Rowley Gallery window through November. The first thirteen paintings of an alphabet of flowers, from A is for Aquilegia to M is for Monarda, though some have sold and been taken away, others have sold and remain for the duration, and others still remain to be sold. In the meantime David has added thirteen illustrated miniature letters, A to M, half a painted alphabet. Continue reading “Half An Alphabet”

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Gymnopédie No.1

Alexandre Tharaud joue la Gymnopédie No.1 d’Erik Satie au coeur du musée.   Continue reading “Gymnopédie No.1”

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