Rowley Gallery Blog
I recently accepted a commission via a client of The Rowley Gallery who had seen my work there. It was to celebrate the landmark 40th birthday of her husband. The commissioned piece was to be one of my Butterfly Balls composed of 40 butterflies created from a black and white map of the area of London where they lived (Shepherd’s Bush). Continue reading “Life Begins At 40”
Beatrice Forshall’s hand-coloured drypoint engravings appear in the May/June issue of Resurgence magazine, illustrating an essay by Germaine Greer on the logical path from feminist to conservationist. Continue reading “Ecological Feminism”
We were welcomed to Much Hadham by a hysteria of wisteria, as though a single vine had united the genteel facades in a euphoric May bank holiday communal hug. Its root system spread throughout the village, linking the houses with its benevolent infrastructure. Or was that just my imagination? Continue reading “Much Hadham & Much Moore”
Next day, our last day in Barcelona, just as we were leaving, we visited the Museu Picasso, but it was a Monday and we should’ve known better. There was another B for Barcelona by the door but it was closed, all day. This had been our first stop three years ago on our previous visit to Barcelona, and was most memorable for Picasso’s variations on a theme by Velázquez, called Las Meninas. Continue reading “Las Meninas”
This large letter B is on a rooftop in the Born district of Barcelona. Is it B for Barcelona or is it perhaps B for Born in Barcelona (that old Springsteen classic)? Or maybe it doesn’t stand for either, especially since it’s lying on its back. Maybe it’s B for Brossa, the Catalan poet, playwright and artist Joan Brossa. He liked to play around with letters and it seems to be on the roof of his theatre. We found it when we came looking for Lottie who lives nearby. We met her under the B for Beer. Continue reading “B For Barcelona”
At the beginning of Stan Brakhage’s filmmaking career, he read all the writings of Sergei Eisenstein he could locate, and this dense montage film is one result. A record of an encounter between Brakhage, Jane, and their friends James Tenney and Carolee Schneemann, it intercuts fragments of each with a cat, floral wallpaper, an embroidered fabric. The figures, the cat, and inanimate objects are made to collide with each other, but they also seem to mysteriously commingle, almost as if alchemically transforming themselves into each other, people becoming objects and animals, and inanimate things seemingly becoming human.
In a series of painstakingly constructed works using found materials Chris Kenny examines and muses on the notion of Paradise: our attempt to define it, build it, reach it or perhaps remember it. Rows of little wooden houses built from abandoned amateur landscape paintings are incised with the names of ideal worlds: Arcadia, Elysium, Utopia. They poignantly demonstrate the common desire to make a heaven on earth, a perfect garden, a harmonious society.
Chris Kenny’s exhibition is at Pitzhanger Manor Gallery, 26 April – 11 May 2014. More details here.
At the beginning of April we installed ten paintings by Jenny Franklin at Kensington Place restaurant, the latest incarnation of their Art Wall series of exhibitions. There are two oil paintings on linen and eight framed watercolours on paper. Continue reading “Jenny Franklin At Kensington Place”
