Rowley Gallery Blog
From Saturnia it’s a short drive to Sovana, a small village with just a single street, beautifully paved in herringbone brickwork. There’s a ruined castle at one end and a cathedral at the other, and a piazza in the middle where we ate delicious lemon pizza for lunch. Continue reading “Sovana & Pitigliano”
The Tarkovsky Quartet – François Couturier, piano; Anja Lechner, violoncello; Jean-Louis Matinier, accordion; Jean-Marc Larché, soprano saxophone – at the Nostalgia Festival, Poznań in 2013.
Andrei Tarkovsky is my favourite filmmaker. “Andrei Rublev” was a revelation for me. Since then I have seen all his films over and over again… They are long poems, hypnotic in their slowness, and pervaded with spirituality. There is very little music in them. Tarkovsky used to say, “It’s my personal conviction that a film does not need music at all.” Anyway, he was a master of using it.
So I did not seek to make ‘scenic’ music of any kind but have tried, instead, to represent in each piece a specific emotion linked to the universe of this director – to his films, of course, but also to some of his favourite actors (Anotoli Solonitsyn, Erland Josephson) or composers (Bach, Pergolesi). Or even to the very original way he plays with shades of colour (“Crépusculaire”). This is our way of paying tribute to this great artist.
François Couturier
Continue reading “Homage To Andrei Tarkovsky”
And then I found this short homage by Martin Kessler. It’s a collection of well-chosen clips from some of Tarkovsky’s best films, beautifully woven together with music by Beethoven and Bach, to produce a sampler that just leaves me wanting to see more of these memorable moving images.
Open Culture: Andrei Tarkovsky
A couple of days later we discovered another ancient abbey, a counterbalance to the beauty and elegance of Sant’Antimo, the Abbazia di San Galgano stands open to the sky, with all the breathtaking grandeur of a canyon carved out of the rock, its great hulk like a ship run aground. Continue reading “San Galgano”
After visiting San Quirico d’Orcia and Montalcino we headed south looking for Bagno Vignoni, a spa since Roman times, but we got distracted along the way by the Abbazia di Sant’Antimo, a beautiful Benedictine monastery set in a lovely landscape of wooded hills and olive groves. Continue reading “Bagno Vignoni”
Ronnie Duncan has been collecting art for more than 60 years, often supporting artists at early stages in their careers. Much of his collection – including works by Terry Frost, Alan Davie, Roger Hilton and Ian Hamilton Finlay – is displayed around Duncan’s home and garden near Otley. It was here that director Jared Schiller and cameraman Stephen Pook filmed “an evocation of the collector’s home”.
This is an update to an earlier trailer for this film – More Love Than Money.
This little film appeared on my screen on Sunday, dropped by a passing bird, and instantly took root.
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Documentary exploring the life and work of writer and art critic John Berger. The film is an intimate portrait of a man who has shaped our understanding of the concept of seeing.
Art, politics and motorcycles – on the occasion of his 90th birthday John Berger or the Art of Looking is an intimate portrait of the writer and art critic whose ground-breaking work on seeing has shaped our understanding of the concept for over five decades. The film explores how paintings become narratives and stories turn into images, and rarely does anybody demonstrate this as poignantly as Berger.
Berger lived and worked for decades in a small mountain village in the French Alps, where the nearness to nature, the world of the peasants and his motorcycle, which for him deals so much with presence, inspired his drawing and writing.
The film introduces Berger’s art of looking with theatre wizard Simon McBurney, film-director Michael Dibb, visual artist John Christie, cartoonist Selçuk Demiral, photographer Jean Mohr as well as two of his children, film-critic Katya Berger and the painter Yves Berger.
The prelude and starting point is Berger’s mind-boggling experience of restored vision following a successful cataract removal surgery. There, in the cusp of his clouding eyesight, Berger re-discovers the irredeemable wonder of seeing.
Realised as a portrait in works and collaborations, this creative documentary takes a different approach to biography, with John Berger leading in his favourite role of the storyteller.
Lapis: James Whitney (1966)
One of James Whitney’s several cinematic masterworks, Lapis develops a series of impossibly dense mandala patterns in increasing intensity, set to a Ravi Shankar track. Whitney spent several years developing the imagery for the film, using his brother John’s homemade and hand-me-down motion control camera rig to realize it. Although James never aligned his creative interests with contemporary psychedelia, his work nevertheless sought to create an audio-visual catalyst for a deep and spiritual contemplation that was not too far removed. – Mark Toscano
I’ve carried the memory of this short film for years. Now, having just found it again, it’s still pretty impressive but not quite so overwhelming as the first time. I was an 18 year old art student watching it on a big screen in a small lecture theatre, with the volume turned up and completely immersed in its kaleidoscopic intensity, I’d never seen anything like it before. The film was made six years earlier, and what I love most about it now is its handmade lo-fi pre-digital devoted dedication to beauty.
I first heard this song on the radio a dozen years ago and I was captivated by it. It’s been echoing in my head ever since. It sounded extraordinary and more beautiful than anything I’d ever heard before. I was sure they said it was by Tomás Méndez but I couldn’t find him on iTunes or anywhere. Then by chance I found this video a few days ago and I can’t stop playing it. I’ve now got the album too so I can sing along when I’m alone in the car, and I sound just like Caetano Veloso! Continue reading “Cucurrucucú Paloma”
Bob Dylan inventing the music video in 1965 round the back of the Savoy Hotel in London.
Fifty years on and he’s back in London tonight, this time at the Royal Albert Hall.