When these children in Paraguay were given the opportunity to learn music there were more students than instruments. Cateura is Paraguay’s biggest landfill with a resourceful tradition of recycling. It seemed only appropriate to make musical instruments from waste materials. Scrap was transformed into violin, cello, double-bass, flute, saxophone, guitar and The Recycled Orchestra was born.
Category: Art
MERZsonata
‘MERZsonata is a homage to Kurt Schwitters’ sound-text masterpiece, the Ursonate…Every sound…has a biographical connection to Schwitters (for example, he wrote a sneezing poem, and he used to bark like a dog each night during his time in the Hutchinson Square Internment Camp on the Isle of Man during the Second World War)…Like the materials of a Schwitters collage, each element is both itself and part of something new.’ – Christopher Fox, 1999. Continue reading “MERZsonata”
Wood Engravings
We just got word that Jonathan Gibbs is exhibiting his wood engravings alongside Brendan Hansbro at The Rectory Gallery on Fournier Street behind Christ Church, Spitalfields. Continue reading “Wood Engravings”
A Local Constable
I stepped out at lunchtime to buy a sandwich and found a John Constable in the street. I was stopped in my tracks by this painting in our neighbour’s window on Kensington Church Street. Such an unexpected and wonderful and privileged encounter; why are there not queues of spectators on the pavement? See it now whilst you still can before it disappears. Continue reading “A Local Constable”
To Mughal India
This procession is at the British Library but we took a circuitous route to find it. We started out for old times’ sake from the Brunswick Centre. Sue used to share a nearby flat, the Gate Bloomsbury (now renamed Renoir) was our local cinema and later Coram’s Fields was always a favourite place to bring the girls, but not today. Continue reading “To Mughal India”
Corr By The River
Christopher Corr has made a series of prints of water for The Nightingale Project, to be displayed at The Woodland Centre, an adult mental health unit at Hillingdon Hospital. He just sent us these images, no words, they speak for themselves, a river of pictures. Continue reading “Corr By The River”
Company
Andrew Walton recently called in to see us on a visit to London from Oxford, and he kindly allowed me to scan his sketchbook. It is filled with a surprising cast of characters hinting at an intriguing automatic narrative. After a closer look I found …I am not sure why I write these things especially as I’m still clueless as to why I make all these drawings of people… Continue reading “Company”
A Talkative Font
Last October Howard Phipps wrote about Eggardon for Frames Of Reference, and he sent me a postcard from the nearby church of St Basil in Toller Fratrum, noting on the back that John Piper was keen on the font. It is either late Saxon or early Norman, with crudely carved figures on a limestone carousel and such an endearing image I wished he could have used it in his Eggardon post. Continue reading “A Talkative Font”
From Powdermills To Wistman’s Wood
Here is an extract from a prose work in progress about family life in summer on Powdermills Farm in the 1960s and 1970s. My father, then head of art at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art, had hired a cottage there, in the middle of the moor, from the Duchy for £70 a year. No electricity, no running water, a ghost in the second bedroom, and sheep in the paddock at shearing season. It was a wild experience. Wistman’s Wood, primordial remains of the original Dartmoor landscape before its Bronze Age settlement, is a few miles walk from Powdermills, and remains one of the most atmospheric and haunting spots on the whole moor. The paintings were made on a return visit in 2009, and there are two of my father’s sketchbook drawings from the late 1960s. The poem comes from First Music, a sequence about Dartmoor, childhood and memory, in the 2011 collection The Rapture (Salt Books). Continue reading “From Powdermills To Wistman’s Wood”
Puri Christmas
Another photograph from the Guardian’s Eyewitness series. These are some of the 500 sculptures of Father Christmas created by students of the sand artist Sudarshan Pattnaik on the beach at Puri in Orissa, India.