Or at least of those things, jaded and happy on the 22nd December, that we could remember…
A is for avaaz – giving the good people, the millions of ordinary people, a real voice. A great thing. www.avaaz.org
B is for Barry the Barber – a Geordie in Spitalfields via New York, great haircuts & beard trimming, good chat, good vibes. www.barrythebarber.com
C is for Christmas, still wonderful, longed for, magic, restful and festive in the right measure…
we plan to…
Hans Holbein the Younger, Derich Born, 1533
…visit Holyroodhouse to see the exhibition of Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein. Over 100 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, miniatures and manuscripts have been gathered together from The Royal Collection – including works by Dürer, Massays, Memling, Cranach the Elder and Holbein the Younger – to give a great insight into Northern Europe’s 15th and 16th revolution in art, scholarship and religion…
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs have long captured our attention. We gazed for what seemed like hours at his seascapes, the frame always divided equally between sea and sky, water and air. The sea always calm, but the horizon sometimes blurred by mist or darkness. They were wonderful, calming, elemental.
Sugimoto’s new photographs are still elemental though this time they are brittle, full of contradictions. Crackling with energy they are somehow still calming. They are of violent electrical charges, but could be of frost on a window, patterns caught in ice or creatures in the deepest sea – they are of fire, light and heat, but can be seen as water, darkness and cold. They are beautiful.
If you’re visiting Edinburgh any time soon you should go and see them here. If you can’t make it to Edinburgh then you can see more of them here and here. Otherwise, here are a few more…
Jo Craven.
I live in the land of big skies. Constable country they call it. No wonder so many artists live here. The fact that this is the end of the line – the train line that is, just a few miles further and you come to a halt in Great Yarmouth – makes this a frontier land…
…at least in what is left of it, we hope to: Wonder at Gaugin’s use of colour at Tate Modern…
…we loved…
The Family and the Land. Sally Mann.
At the Photographer’s Gallery, London until 19th September. See it there before the gallery closes for refurbishment this autumn…
Daisy Garnett.
“You’d hate to run into someone you knew…” the photographer and artist Deborah Turbeville has scrawled at the top of one of the photographs that appear in her autobiographical book Casa No Name, taken in and close to her Mexican house of the same name. “It would ruin the spell.” Luckily for us, no matter how hard you scrutinize a Turbeville photograph, its spell remains intact…
San Miguel de Allende, high on Mexico’s central plains, and thrilled to discover that the house we were to shoot in – the house that had initially drawn us to Mexico – belonged to the great photographer Deborah Turbeville. Great fans of her work, freshly arrived in the country and feeling slightly like strangers in a new (to us) land, this felt to be both an inspiration and a reassurance – we must be on the right track! Delightful days of work followed – and some hours of conversation with the elegant, super-alert and erudite Ms Turbeville. Thus the opening pictures in our new catalogue, this little film…
