Scrapbooks
Thoughts on scrapbooks, especially those made by Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden
‘The Sandgate Dandling Song’ and ‘The Captain’s Apprentice’
About The Unthanks and Ralph Vaughan Williams
Becoming Invisible
‘Wood and Water’, Jonas Bak’s beautiful and sensitively modest film, concerns Anke, a widowed older woman, who is becoming ‘invisible’…
Carts and Caravans
In A Time from the World, Rowena Farre tells the story of how she lived with Romanies and other travelling people, picking fruit and vegetables, selling trinkets, and telling fortunes…
Tales from the Embassy
Dave Tomlin, a musician closely involved with London’s 1960s counterculture, was living in a house in Lancaster Grove some years later when he was served an eviction notice. As he had done before when he needed to find a new place to stay, he set out on a walk, looking for abandoned homes, and his wanderings brought him down Avenue Road in Swiss Cottage…
Ghost Songs
Dreams of perpetual economic growth and ever-increasing wealth are illusions, and they have blocked our awareness of the sufficiency that is already at hand. The world is being hollowed out and is turning ghostly…
Petrópolis
In 1940, Stefan Zweig rented a modest house on a hillside outside Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro, and lived there with his second wife, Lotte Altmann…
Grass-weaving and Psalm-singing
Angus MacPhee was born in Nettlehole, near Glasgow, but his crofting family returned home to South Uist in the Outer Hebrides a few years later. As a young boy he loved working with horses and showed some talent in music and singing; he also learnt how to make ropes, horse-harnesses, and other useful things from the abundant marram grass that was to be found on the island.
Eric Clapton, Romain Rolland, and Rabindranath Tagore
As one of the iconic rock musicians of the 1960s, almost all of Eric Clapton’s influences, as well as the challenges that he has faced and overcome, have been exhaustively documented and explored, but it is not widely known that he has much affection for Jean-Christophe, the ten-volume novel by Romain Rolland, published in the journal ‘Cahiers de la Quinzaine’ from 1904 to 1912.
Standing Still
In a collection of essays entitled Art Can Help, the photographer Robert Adams writes about images that evoke beauty without irony or sentimentality, proposing that ‘it is the responsibility of artists to pay attention to the world, pleasant or otherwise, and to help us live respectfully in it’.
A Delicate Life
In about 1923, John Craske began to make pictures of the sea and the coastline, painting on cardboard, wrapping paper, doors, mantelpieces, jugs, and crockery. He also made toy boats. Later, when he was not able to paint, he made embroideries while sitting upright in bed, supported by cushions. Their subjects are the same as those of his paintings – fishing boats tossed about in rough seas or beached on the shore, a lighthouse illuminating a ship in a storm, sailors being rescued by breeches buoy.