Hardy Ash?

Last Sunday I went back to St Pancras Old Church for the first time since April (A Walk From King’s Cross) to see how the Hardy Tree was getting on. It is not a particularly grand tree, nor is it ancient but it is probably London’s most significant ash tree. With all the hysteria in the press I wondered if I would find signs here of ash dieback. Is this tree able to withstand the coming plague or is it doomed and this site to become a memorial to fraxinus excelsior? Continue reading “Hardy Ash?”

Frames of reference

Kite Paintings

Last Saturday, as a break from Christmas shopping and to escape the hectic West End crowds, I found a few moments of calm at the Gimpel Fils gallery amongst these wonderful Richard Smith paintings. The exhibition is called Kite Paintings and includes a group of rarely seen works from the 1970s, with canvas stretched on aluminium poles, recalling tents and sails as well as kites. Continue reading “Kite Paintings”

Frames of reference

Notes From St Ives

Just a few notes and pictures after a wonderful trip to St Ives. I was down to exhibit again with the National Acrylic Painters Association who were showing in the famous Crypt Gallery which in the 1940s was the venue of exhibitions by the Crypt group when St Ives was at the cutting edge of British painting and sculpture. Continue reading “Notes From St Ives”

Frames of reference

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.

Frames of reference

For William Turnbull

I treasure this little booklet. It’s a catalogue from Waddington Galleries in 1981, a souvenir of a beautiful and influential little exhibition of small bronzes. It got me looking at Brancusi and Giacometti and prompted countless visits to the British Museum where I discovered Cycladic figurines and Bronze Age beaker pots, Elgin marbles and Benin bronzes and much more. William Turnbull’s work seemed to contain all the best bits, all distilled from seeds gathered from around the world and filtered through his hands. Continue reading “For William Turnbull”

Frames of reference