Rowley Gallery Blog
Twelve framed hand-coloured linocuts by Liz Somerville in our window throughout August and September. They’re part of a suite of 48 prints called The Ways, celebrating four ancient paths through England. There’s also a limited edition concertina booklet of all the images in miniature. Continue reading “The Ways”
One day I will finally get to Wistman’s Wood. It’s haunted me for years. But for now here’s a glimpse of it lost on Dartmoor. An arboreal oasis in a wet desert, a vestigial reminder of the temperate rainforest that once grew on this now sodden moorland. Continue reading “The Wet Desert”
Howard Phipps‘s wood engravings are included in the exhibition Awake Through Years: Four South West Wood Engravers at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter from 7 December. Howard will be showing 25 works including working drawings plus book illustrations. The other artists are Harry Brockway, Hilary Paynter and Pam Pebworth. More information here – Awake Through Years.
Here is an extract from a prose work in progress about family life in summer on Powdermills Farm in the 1960s and 1970s. My father, then head of art at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art, had hired a cottage there, in the middle of the moor, from the Duchy for £70 a year. No electricity, no running water, a ghost in the second bedroom, and sheep in the paddock at shearing season. It was a wild experience. Wistman’s Wood, primordial remains of the original Dartmoor landscape before its Bronze Age settlement, is a few miles walk from Powdermills, and remains one of the most atmospheric and haunting spots on the whole moor. The paintings were made on a return visit in 2009, and there are two of my father’s sketchbook drawings from the late 1960s. The poem comes from First Music, a sequence about Dartmoor, childhood and memory, in the 2011 collection The Rapture (Salt Books). Continue reading “From Powdermills To Wistman’s Wood”
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.
John Hubbard is currently exhibiting a selection of paintings inspired by the gardens of the Alhambra and other Spanish gardens at The Art Room in Topsham, Devon until August 12th.
When Howard Phipps first showed me this engraving it seemed to refer to a type of oak wood more familiar from France or Spain. I was so intrigued by it that I asked if he might write something for us, and here is his reply: Continue reading “Wistman’s Wood”