On art.

For about 40 years I have had this oil painting in various sorts of storage and knew it for longer on my parents' walls. It is by my grandmother, the artist and poet who was, on her third marriage, Mrs Clifford Bax, née Vera May Rawnsley (and following marriages to Stanley North and Filson Young).

The undated painting is titled "The Old-fashioned Dress" (but the sitter isn't named). I am pretty sure my parents (Paul and Margaret - Peggy - North) told me it's a portrait of their friend, Nora Whitehall. Read more...

In the past week or so I have visited Luke Jerram's twin Mars and Earth planets, as they temporarily loomed in Chichester and Lambeth cathedrals respectively, and thought of Elon Musk and Greta Thunberg, and humanity's multiple wings and prayers.
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I want to honour the life of Kate Hepburn, the graphics designer, who died in Hampstead's Royal Free Hospital in late July this summer. She made a big impression at Vole magazine in the late 1970s, and in many other creative ventures. Corrections and new information would be very welcome. Read more...

It has taken me many years to fret out what I mean by the question: What to do with words like 'spirituality' when applied in a material universe? Now that, at last, I think I have something like answers, the next question is: Can I usefully express myself on the matter? This post will be something of an evolving draft. Here goes.... Read more...

Excellent and, as usual, tantalising evidence of Stanley North's nature has quite suddenly been put my way. Tanya Harrod, the writer on the history and relationship of the worlds of art and of crafts, wrote asking me for some information about Stanley. Along the way Dr Harrod told me that Lucie Rie, the crucial modernist potter, had formed a strong relationship with Stanley, shortly after her arrival in London and late in his quite short life. Read more...

Percy Dearmer (1867-1936) was an inventive and creative churchman. His son, Geoffrey Dearmer (1893-1996), was a fine WW1 poet who was re-discovered when he was aged 100. His grand-daughter, Juliet Woollcombe, now in her 80s, fulfilled the ambition of his feminist circle: she was ordained a priest in 1994. There is much more to be said about this remarkable family, and not least about its women. I attempt to tell some of that story, which I characterise as a pilgrimage, below the fold. Read more...

In my late father's papers I recently came across a typescript of Tides of Invasion: The Selsey story, a pageant by Geoffrey Dearmer. I knew the author was a distinguished WW1 poet, long neglected, who had one important but slight Selsey connection. Light investigation revealed nothing about Tides though it was great to find that Juliet Woollcombe, the author's daughter, knew a great deal about it and shared some ancilliary material as to its sole performance in 1965. Still, I have seen no other evidence of the pageant's existence or performance. Read more...

Stanley North was aged 28 when he made an imagined medieval manuscript of part of the Book of Common Prayer, "The Lord's Supper", the Communion service, in 1915. Its 150-odd pages became famous, in a circuitous way, when another of his illustrated manuscripts was given honourable mention in a famous series of "Girls' Books" by Elsie J Oxenham. More below the fold, as one might say in the world of newsprint.

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I recently (May, 2022) spent a wonderful few hours at the villa in Bath, Somerset where Ras Tafari, Emperor Haile Selassie spent 1936-40 in exile from his country, Ethiopia, which had been over-run by Italy's Fascist troops. Selassie has resonated with me since I talked with two of his admirers. I interviewed Bob Marley in July 1980 and read Wilfred Thesiger's A Life of My Choice (1987) and at some point interviewed the grand old man of desert travel and SAS action. It seems that of the two only Thesiger knew the Emperor personally. Here are a few reflections on the Emperor, and his place in history and in Bath. Read more...

We are missing a huge opportunity to cheaply and globally spread pleasure and much else. I am a fan of the digital reproduction of real world artworks, indeed of hardcopy images of every sort, whether 2D or 3D. This piece discusses these issues as applied to maps, paintings, drawings, embroideries, fabrics and - last but by no means least - stained glass windows.  I am drawing attention to our generation's failure to post online digital images at medium or high resolution a far greater abundance of artwork. I am hoping to encourage publishers and owners of medium- and hi-res images, and curators of real world images, to get behind this sort of work. (Elsewhere I look at the 2D and 3D digital facsimile world of Factum Arte.)

I hope these four case studies may make the points. Read more...