Rowley Gallery Blog
A young couple, framed by trees, walk the line down the tunnel of love, a two mile long section of railway near the town of Klevan in the Ukraine. A train runs down it three times a day. They’d better watch out for the Love Train!
This photograph is another from the Guardian’s Eyewitness series.
The weekend before last we went up to Suffolk to visit the Alde Valley Spring Festival. It’s at White House Farm in Great Glemham where barns and out-buildings are used to display local crafts and artworks. Appropriately Jelly Green‘s lively paintings occupied the former cowshed. Continue reading “Alde Valley Spring Festival”
At this time of year I always remember Lowell George and the line about ‘mysterious wisteria’ from his song 20 Million Things. Continue reading “Mysterious Wisterias”
Last month my daughter gave me this book of magical trees for my birthday. It’s a collection of hand-pulled screenprints on black paper, bound by hand into a gorgeous book where, according to John Berger, “the nightingale sings until morning”. Continue reading “The Night Life Of Trees”
We recently framed these two images by Pia Gazzola. Above is a digital photograph of bamboo leaves dipped in ink, moved by the wind to draw on the sheet of paper placed beneath them. Below is the drawing they produced. They are from a series of artworks where trees are encouraged to make drawings. Bamboo, strictly speaking is a grass rather than a tree, but with a history of service in providing drawing implements. See more here.
King’s Cross station has a new concourse, enclosed by a beautiful, sculptural roof which grows from a steel trunk and spreads into a tree-like canopy of intersecting branches. They meet the ground along the semi-circular perimeter, which is a continuation of the arc of the Great Northern Hotel, which was in turn shaped by the curve around a bend of the River Fleet. Continue reading “A Walk From King’s Cross (With Labels)”
These beautiful Mbuti barkcloth paintings are part of an exhibition at Raven Row called The Stuff That Matters. I was surprised and delighted by them, and taken back to 1980 when I saw an advertisement in Art In America for an exhibition of Pygmy Drawings at the Linda Einfeld Gallery in Chicago. The illustration struck a chord with me then and I wrote off for a catalogue. Continue reading “The Beauty Of Mbuti”
We put the clocks forward last weekend for British Summer Time and it worked. Suddenly it’s summer, in March. Today the temperature was as high as 23 Centigrade in London, that’s about 75 Fahrenheit. There are no leaves on the trees yet, but there is blossom everywhere. Here are two paintings by Mary Kuper of cherry blossom in Regents Park. Continue reading “In Regents Park”
Seeing Paul Finn’s Spring Blossoms Umbria reminded me of this painting, Elgin Crescent, Spring, Cherry by Isobel Johnstone, painted from her window down by Ladbroke Grove. Something similar is happening here with the interrupted view through the branches, and the tangle of foreground and background. The streets hereabouts are bursting with blossom now; I can see magnolia and cherry and forsythia. In this little painting I can also see Pollock and Tobey and Mondrian.
Spring Blossoms Umbria 2011 was started last year after visiting Orvieto again. A fine meal at L’Etrusca followed by a long walk into the fields surrounding Orvieto kick-started this one. In some ways it is a little different to the others in that it has a sense of being “in” the landscape as opposed to looking at a place from a distance. Looking through trees onto fields has created interesting tensions between flatness, illusion, realism, abstraction, pattern and surface. Although I will continue to make paintings of places there is something very interesting happening in Spring Blossoms Umbria. Continue reading “Spring Blossoms Umbria”