Rowley Gallery Blog
I’d not been to Hastings before. Strange to admit, especially since I lived in Maidstone for three years just 30 miles away, though that was over 40 years ago. Hastings was where John Martyn lived but, as much as I loved his music, we always by-passed the town on our way home from Brighton. Continue reading “Unknown Countries”
As a birthday treat Sue took me for a walk on the Dengie Peninsula on the far eastern shore of Essex. She had her eyes on the horizon. We arrived via Burnham-on-Crouch, a pretty Georgian estuary town but with the saddest fish & chips and a clown to scare the children. His car was parked next to ours. We made our escape towards Southminster, but we got ensnared by the Burnham Loop where we revolved time and again around the endless fenlands (afeared lest we contract Dengie Fever from the mosquito-infested swamps) until finally we saw the error of our ways (a misplaced signpost) and we were at last expelled to Tillingham and ultimately onwards to Bradwell-on-Sea. Continue reading “To The Horizon”
A short film for Valentine’s Day. And for every day.
The Climate Coalition / Show The Love / World Wide Fund for Nature
Manningtree was another daytrip destination in the early 1980s. We came on the train with our bikes from Liverpool Street to explore the country lanes around Dedham and Flatford, but we didn’t see much of Manningtree apart from the station. It was the gateway to Constable country. Continue reading “Manningtree”
Last summer, travelling through France, I wish I could remember where this was, the first of many half-timbered buildings encountered en route. I love this style of vernacular architecture. They seem so obviously hand-made, constructed from local materials, a natural part of the landscape. More analogue than digital, I started to think of them almost as organic sculptures. Continue reading “Half-Timbered”
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”
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.
We returned to work on Monday to find this late Christmas bonus waiting for us from Andrew Walton. Not only did it bring Season’s Greetings but also news of a forthcoming exhibition. Continue reading “A Late Christmas Card”
chris, got another hot blog, or so i think. sharon’s aunt & uncle live in the country, near romsey, & they have the luxury of a swimming pool in their garden. they recently bought a changing hut, & asked me to paint something on the doors. today i did just that… cheers, jonny. Continue reading “La Mer”
This is The Rowley Gallery joiners shop in the summer of 2012, a black wooden shed perched on the flat roof of the ground floor workshop. Access is by spiral staircase and it’s where I join picture frames. It sits in the shelter of a towering tree-of-heaven, Ailanthus altissima, which in my early days here I remember as a self-sown seedling. No-one paid it too much attention, but before long I loved its dappled light in summer, and in winter I measured the sky through its mesh of branches. Continue reading “Tree Of Heaven”