Haunted by a strange green world: ‘Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers’

There’s a painting in the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery that I can’t say I exactly liked as a child, but it fascinated me and has haunted me a little ever since.

Shooting Trees – Into the Woods: Trees in Photography, V&A

Here were ancient trees, darkling trees, summer and winter trees, ancient oaks, looming pines, explosive cherries, laugh out loud at the wonder of it all trees. In one case a massive old volume was open on a page showing a 19th century photograph of a large Beech. Especially fascinating was the tree’s position on the side of a sunken lane, which meant that its multiple tangled roots were exposed to the world, in a glorious, twisting, serpentine display.

A Veritable Bewilderment of Delights

I’ve always quite liked the style of old handbills: the erratic punctuation, jumbled type sizes and overuse of exclamation marks especially. If I produced a handbill for this blog, it would look something like this…

Digital Photography and the flattening of landscape

Human subjects are emotional, sentient creatures, who may get upset with how they look, or not want a photograph taken at all. When it comes to landscape photography, surely the situation is different? Or isn’t it? Does the place in the frame become a little thinner every time it is snapped and shared?

Saving Pages: A selection of vintage bookmarks

As a child of second-hand booksellers I had ready access to books and their offshoot – bookmarks. I recently rediscovered a box filled with some that once upon a time I had hoarded.

In The Shadow of the Library: Terror and Wonder – The Gothic Imagination

Crumbling ruins, moonlight, tree-lined walks, bats flitting, owls hooting, wolves howling, trapdoors and darkling cellar stairs…

Ever since I can remember I’ve been attracted to things that might be termed ‘Gothic’. For that reason I have been looking forward enormously to the latest exhibition at the British Library: Terror and Wonder – The Gothic Imagination.

William it was really something: A Blake birthday walk with CURIOCITY magazine

To celebrate the 256th anniversary of William Blake’s birth. Curiocity – the map magazine –organized a Blake themed walk around Soho, Covent Garden and Piccadilly.

Walking into history: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts

As a reader some books are inevitable. This one had nagged at me for years, before finally, I plunged in and it felt like meeting an old friend.

Paintings to jump into, faces to shun: Robert Hughes on Goya

Goya’s Pilgrimage to St. Isidore’s hermitage often comes to mind when I hear P J Harvey’s ‘The Last Living Rose’ A lyrical story of a similar kind of mad parade, this one though tottering through the faded glories of a lost, misremembered past, in a rotting, dank, defiantly not European England.