Category: Video

For James Ravilious

This is a short trailer for James Ravilious: A World In Photographs, a film by Hugh and Anson Hartford, originally shown on BBC Four and now available from Banyak Films. The first time I saw his photographs was in the early 1980s at an exhibition by Common Ground called Second Nature at the London Ecology Centre in Covent Garden. I came away with a beautiful photograph of sheep in the shade of an oak tree, In The Heat Of May, just one of 80,000 photographs he took of rural life in North Devon for the Beaford Archive between 1972 and 1999. He was the son of artist and designer Eric Ravilious, and he was a self-taught photographer. Read more at the James Ravilious website.

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It’s High Time

A couple of weeks ago I saw the Jan Garbarek Group play at the Royal Festival Hall as part of the London Jazz Festival. I didn’t take a camera, this image is courtesy of Gert Rickmann-Wunderlich. Garbarek was cool and sharp on soprano saxophone, warmer on tenor saxophone, always assured and inventive, but he was the only member of the group who did not take a solo. He retired too often to his seat behind the piano. I would have liked to hear him play more. Continue reading “It’s High Time”

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Cork By Cork

Conrad Engelhardt makes mosaics from used wine corks. He brings them to us at The Rowley Gallery for framing. Now he has sent us this little video to show how they are made. There is a lot of arranging and rearranging involved, trying out different combinations, it must have seemed a logical progression to record the process by stop motion animation. See also our earlier post What A Corker! The piece featured there is now on display at Lutyens in Fleet Street.

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Hojas De Otoño

Autumn leaves in the Jardin de Principe in Aranjuez, Spain. We were driving from Madrid to Toledo and stopped here for lunch and a walk in the park. This garden and the adjacent Jardin de la Isla were laid out around the royal palace of Philip II in the 16th century, 200 years before the present town was built. They became the inspiration in 1939 for the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo. Continue reading “Hojas De Otoño”

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The Trees Of Aldgate

They seem to be mostly larch. This intricate timber frame construction is made from 17 cubic metres of larch. It stands on a traffic island by St Botolph’s church at the start of the A11, the road from London to Norwich, and it marks the place where the Aldgate once stood. Continue reading “The Trees Of Aldgate”

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Tea For Two

The Mermaid Café is Jonny Hannah’s ideal music venue. You can call in for a coffee or a beer, or the house speciality carbolic milkshake, and share a table with Joni Mitchell whilst you listen to Woody Guthrie or Slim Gaillard or maybe Bo Diddley. Today Anita O’Day is on the bill. Continue reading “Tea For Two”

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Utopia

Christopher Corr sent us these photographs from America. They show a wonderful collection of mostly wooden vernacular buildings at the Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts. The Shakers began building a community here in the 1780s and continued up until the 1960s. They considered this their utopia and named it The City of Peace. Many of their buildings are still preserved here. Some have been lost and some have been re-erected here from other Shaker settlements. Continue reading “Utopia”

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Running & Painting

Running and painting surprisingly have much in common, the main similarity being that they are both totally engrossing activities. Both are an integral part of my life where withdrawal symptoms occur if stopped for any length of time. They both allow me to lose myself in the struggle and sheer pleasure of the activity and forget any other pressing problems. Continue reading “Running & Painting”

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