Rowley Gallery Blog
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”
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”
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”
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.
Over the last few weeks David Hollington has regularly been bringing us new paintings. Sometimes he brings just one, other times he arrives with a couple, and each time they’re increasingly more seasonal, almost like an advent calendar counting down to Christmas. Continue reading “Winter’s Herald”
Fanny Shorter was asked to design the packaging for a new 24 hour watch by Mr Jones. She used it as an opportunity to illustrate the life-cycle of the mayfly, which as an adult lives for just one day. Continue reading “Time Mayfly”
So we’re all looking forward (in no particular order) to Christmas, The Mayan ‘Apocalypse’ 21/12/12, The Euro Apocalypse / the imminent Bond Market collapse, the next high flying celebrity to crash and burn, the next Flood, the first nuclear war, escape to the Moon/Mars…. etc. And I was thinking how could a painter find any relevance with all this going on. But the internet is a wonderful thing for connecting anything to everything and a reminder that these type of events constantly recur, that the oldest themes in art are the best and that there’s nothing new under the sun. Continue reading “Apocalypse Now (Or Maybe Tomorrow)”
In his recent autumn statement, the chancellor George Osborne, as far as I know, did not make any reference to either falling leaves, early frosts, golden hues or mists and mellow fruitfulness and not that I am an admirer of Mr Osborne, I will never the less try to follow his lead and not dwell on its well know visual attributes. Because lets face it, as seasons go, autumn is a bit of a cliché and for any artist who doesn’t aspire to see their work adorning biscuit tins or tacky calendars it is definitely one to be avoided. This was (I convinced myself) my opinion when a couple of years ago I received a private commission to paint a picture depicting autumn and for a long time I pretended that autumn’s corny overtones were the reason I could never seem to start the picture. Continue reading “Autumn Statement”
