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Category: Art

Lingering Ghosts and the challenges of Public Art

Lingering Ghosts and the challenges of Public Art

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  For those of you who know Sarum College you will be aware that we have a long tradition of exhibiting Art. At the moment we are showing some arresting and disturbing portraits crafted by Sam Ivin (pictured above) Sam Ivin is a photographer whose work focuses on social issues and the people connected with them. He studied Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Newport, graduating in 2014. This exhibition, Lingering Ghosts, consists of hand-scratched portraits of those seeking…

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The Windows

The Windows

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  The Windows       Lord, how can man preach thy eternall word? He is a brittle crazie glasse: Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford This glorious and transcendent place, To be a window, through thy grace.     But when thou dost anneal in glasse thy storie, Making thy life to shine within The holy Preachers; then the light and glorie More rev’rend grows, and more doth win: Which else shows watrish, bleak, and thin.  …

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Miro on Ageing

Miro on Ageing

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PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS AN OLD MAN When artist Joan Miro was 24 years old, he predicted that he would do his best work in old age. The exhibition, “Joan Miro: Instinct and Imagination,” documents the work he did in his 70’s and 80’s.  In keeping with the idea of positive aging, Miro described himself as working like a gardener: “Everything takes time… Things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen.” His life-course also manifested the process of…

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Auckland Castle

Auckland Castle

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I have very vivid memories of visiting Auckland Castle as a sixth form student beginning to wonder about my vocation to the ordained ministry in the Church of England. At a young people’s gathering in the Throne room of this imposing building I remember the Bishop of Durham, John Habgood, addressing us in a simple and direct way and asking us to consider how best we could use our lives for God. In retrospect this may well have been a…

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The genious of Gormley

The genious of Gormley

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 I was determined to make a significant   detour during  August to see some public sculpture on Crosby beach and this short piece gives me an opportunity to show off some of my photographs. The journey to Liverpool  was not in vain and  I was able to glimpse again at first hand the sheer genius of Gormley  as a sculptor and public artist. Another place  consists (I believe 60)  cast iron sculptures of the artist’s own body, facing towards the sea….

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Vacation Surprises : (1) Craigie Aitchison in Glass

Vacation Surprises : (1) Craigie Aitchison in Glass

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  I travelled up to London during my summer holiday to attend a wonderful celebration of marriage of Robin and Sezgi Amos at St Mary the Bolton’s in Chelsea. It was a sunny day and I managed to arrive at the church early to catch up with friends. As I wandered around the church building I looked through one of the windows on the north side of the church to discover this shot of colour  which really intrigued me  !…

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intricate

intricate

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  intricate Intricate and untraceable weaving and interweaving, dark strand with light: designed, beyond all spiderly contrivance, to link, not to entrap: elation, grief, joy, contrition, entwined; shaking, changing, forever forming, transforming: all praise, all praise to the great web. Denise Levertov, Web  

roses in sunlight

roses in sunlight

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  roses in sunlight Our sense of these things changes and they change, Not as in metaphor, but in our sense Of them. So sense exceeds all metaphor. It exceeds the heavy changes of the light. It is like a flow of meanings with no speech And of as many meanings as of men. We are two that use these roses as we are, In seeing them. This is what makes them seem So far beyond the rhetorician’s touch. Wallace…

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Peter Lanyon

Peter Lanyon

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I love surprising discoveries. As a very enjoyable lunch last week in a London restaurant in Notting Hill this particular picture captured my imagination. I was sitting opposite it and amazed at its rhythmic and soothing effect. Painted by a Cornishman, influenced by American abstract Expressionists (especially Jackson Pollock) Lanyon is  rooted in the Cornish landscape. Looking at this gave me a extraordinary sense of being in nature. Have a look closely at it. Painted in 1958 and entitled Barley…

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Peter Lanyon

Peter Lanyon

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I love surprising discoveries. As a very enjoyable lunch last week in a London restaurant in Notting Hill this particular picture captured my imagination. I was sitting opposite it and amazed at its rhythmic and soothing effect. Painted by a Cornishman, influenced by American abstract Expressionists (especially Jackson Pollock) Lanyon is  rooted in the Cornish landscape. Looking at this gave me a extraordinary sense of being in nature. Have a look closely at it. Painted in 1958 and entitled Barley…

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thy fearful symmetry

thy fearful symmetry

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  angel tiger Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry  ? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare sieze the fire? When the stars threw down their spears, And watered heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? from William Blake,…

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Let us return?

Let us return?

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  ultimate blue   Let us return to imperfection’s school. No longer wandering after Plato’s ghost, Seeking the garden where all fruit is flawless, We must at last renounce that ultimate blue And take a walk in other kinds of weather.   From Adrienne Rich, Stepping backward  

Image of the week : Black on Maroon by Rothko

Image of the week : Black on Maroon by Rothko

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This painting comes from one of three series of canvases painted by Rothko in 1958-9 in response to a commission for murals for the small dining room of the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York. The Four Seasons, one of the smartest restaurants in the city, is in the Seagram Building, a celebrated classic modern skyscraper on Park Avenue designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. As he worked on the commission Rothko’s conception of the scheme became…

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Image of the week: A Busy Life by Dubuffett

Image of the week: A Busy Life by Dubuffett

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  Painted in August 1953. It is one of the series of paintings known as ‘Beaten Pastes’ (Pâtes battues) executed between March and December 1953 of which Dubuffet has written: ‘These paintings are done with a smooth light coloured (almost white) paste, fairly thick, spread unevenly and rapidly with a plasterer’s knife over layers already thickly painted and still fresh, in such a way that the various colours underneath show where the paste is missing, as well as tint the…

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Ways into death and its narratives

Ways into death and its narratives

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  Quietus: The vessel, death and the human body An exhibition by Julian Stair Winchester Cathedral Autumn 2013 FB friends will have seen some (not very good) photographs of Winchester Cathedral caused in part by a failure to take my specs on my journey ! However the main reason for the visit south was to see this exhibition and it did not disappoint. Stair tests the boundaries of subject and possibility in ceramics – he reminds us that art has always…

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Chagall at Chichester

Chagall at Chichester

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A popular feature of Chichester Cathedral is a stained glass window on the north side, designed and created by the French artist Marc Chagall. The window is inspired by Psalm 150, which urges its readers to ‘let everything that hath breath praise the Lord’. Vibrant and colourful, our Chagall window encompasses aspects of the Anglican and Chagall’s own Jewish faith. Dr Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, in his preface to Chagall Glass at Chichester says:  “The concept that Art can add…

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The sacrament of Art

The sacrament of Art

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David Jones Artist 1895-1974 Art for David Jones is a sacramental process – the record of interface with God. Artworks are the fragments of traces left over from this colloquy.  These residues are in exact remains and it is their very imperfections that compel artists obsessively to continue with this process of creating each day; and indeed in all of our life it is our failures that are the catalyst to regain the contact we seek from the luminous.  This…

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The necessity of Age!

The necessity of Age!

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OLD MASTERS  How long does it take to become an Old Master?  Longer than one might think: Louise Bourgeois, a great experimental sculptor, once declared ‘I am a long-distance runner. It takes me years and years and years to produce what I do.” Bourgeois made her greatest work after the age of 80. When she was 84, and an interviewer asked whether she could have made one of her recent works earlier in her career, she replied, ‘Absolutely not.’ When…

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