Rowley Gallery Blog
We arrived at the village of Stoughton in a remote valley of the South Downs via a single track road from the north. It felt like we were coming to the back of beyond. We left the car by the Hare & Hounds and began the long slow climb along this farm track up to Stoughton Down. Continue reading “Vale Of Yew”
She was not always in the best of health, all those cigarettes, all that rum. But it’s still a shock that she’s gone. Her voice made you feel close to her. Here’s a reminder of how beautiful she could be.
A not to be missed film telling the story of an Amy Winehouse performance before an audience of 85 in a little church in Ireland in 2006, to be broadcast next Monday, July 23rd at 10pm on BBC4 – Arena.
The Basilica of San Francesco in Arrezo, Tuscany, a late medieval church dedicated to St Francis of Assisi. In the chancel, the Cappella Maggiore, is one of the masterpieces of the Italian Early Renaissance. The walls are covered with a sequence of frescoes by Piero della Francesca depicting episodes from The Legend of The True Cross. Behind the suspended crucifix, at the lower right of the window is The Vision of Constantine, an image which has haunted Patti Smith for years. Continue reading “Constantine’s Dream”
One day a man from over the hills came into the shop to buy a greetings card. He was a graceless man of few words though he did say the card was for his sick mother, but the words seemed to stumble over his tongue as he spoke. He was a large, lumbering, oaf of a man yet he was very quick to choose a card, and he paid for it with a crisp, new £50 note. Continue reading “Metamorphosis”
A nice bundle of clean, new leaves of walnut burr veneer fresh from the tree. Continue reading “A Bundle Of Walnut”
Marc the electrician came to see us, to fix the lighting and to bring us these delicious eggs from his garden in Thornton Heath where he keeps Cotswold Legbars, French Copper Neck Marans, a large speckled hen and a black tailed Colombian. Continue reading “Chick, Chick, Chick, Chick, Chicken”
Three big new paintings by Jelly Green go on show at Kensington Place from Tuesday 7th August. Their large north wall has inspired Jelly to stretch out and paint on a much larger scale than before.
The cows in this new series of paintings graze on the water meadows in the Alde Valley. One of the lovely things about this particular herd is that unusually they are a mixture of breeds from Simmentals to Belgian Blues and Charolais, which provides a much wider palette of colours and forms. These three paintings are my largest pieces yet. There is something really intimidating and challenging about working on this scale: the potential for failure is magnified, the empty space to fill completely daunting. But when they work, it’s a huge relief and a painting that is hard to ignore.
This is another from the Guardian’s Eyewitness series, and it’s also another in a developing Frames of Reference series. This is Cwm Idwal, a valley in Snowdonia, and a word which seems to keep recurring, either as cwm or combe or comb. See earlier posts Down & Round & Up & Over and Wind Comb and Combe Again. This time it’s a photograph which won the National Parks Landscape Photograph Competition by Michal Tekel and it’s what you might call sublime.
