Rowley Gallery Blog
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”
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”
Joanne Hodgen has lots of fun painting her children. She loves to get them to make faces then captures them with lots of thick, gooey paint, the kind of stuff kids enjoy getting their hands stuck into. She just brought us this new one and you can see more on her page at The Rowley Gallery.
David Hollington sent us this invitation to his friend’s exhibition: Continue reading “New Paintings”
On Sunday Kai is running the Royal Parks Foundation Half Marathon through Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, St James’s Park and Green Park. This will be the culmination of her running & cycling events to raise money for charity. Here she is being congratulated and comparing medals after the London Bikeathon at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. Please see her page at JustGiving.
These are the first etchings I have done since printmaking at Edinburgh College of Art in 1984-88 where I did a lot of mixed media using silkscreen printing with etching. They are solar plate intaglio and relief etchings. It’s a technique which allows you to transfer a black ink drawing made on acetate onto a plate, using the sun to etch the plate, by exposing it to the sun for as little as 3-4 minutes, rather than using toxic chemicals. These are my first attempts. Continue reading “Printmaking In Granada”
Water is elemental, it’s what we’re made of, what we can’t live within or without.
So begins this wonderful book by Leanne Shapton. I’d seen her paintings at Lutyens & Rubentein but hadn’t realised she was also a writer. This is a memoir of her days training as an Olympic swimmer and of how that obsession shaped her later life as an artist. I’m no swimmer, maybe a gentle back paddle, preferably in a river rather than a pool, but I’m buoyed up by reading Swimming Studies.
We left the car by the duck pond at Wickham St Paul. After breakfast at Spencer’s Farm Shop of coffee and the best bacon sandwiches north of Columbia Road Market we walked down Rectory Lane past hedgerows heavy with hips and haws, and with elderberries and blackberries. There were hazelnuts and crab apples, hops, sloes, bullace, sweet chestnuts and acorns. There was ivy and bryony and guelder rose too, and there was lots of surprising blessed sunshine. Continue reading “Castle Hedingham”
Through this drenched and complex summer I have gazed in frustration at a garden weighed down with its own entanglements. As I hopped, skipped and jumped through incessant showers to the studio I was the beneficiary of some damp osmosis which gave me colour and form for my Deluge series, and a happy series it turned out to be. The only sting in the tail being exhaustion for weeks afterwards. Continue reading “Deluge”
Kenwood House is presently under wraps. It’s not a Christo sculpture. It is undergoing a thorough refurbishment, £6 million of lottery funding and some from English Heritage. The collection of paintings is now on a tour of the USA. Continue reading “Kenwood In The Rain”