So, we move into summer.
Wonders in my garden:
Then, I catch a herd of 40 deer in the forest:
Difficult to catch on film.
For once the Aurora Borealis gets as far as my neck of the woods: wonderful colours in the night sky:
A new MeM AAD begins with some 42 participants. We began seven years ago with 8!!
And, so to Cornwall.
It’s a real art week.
Firstly,is their Open Studio week. An opportunity to visit studios, see work in progress and chat with artists and craftspeople. Lots of interesting stuff: like work with textiles and materials:
I also make it to Tate St Ives for two superb exhibitions.
Firstly, a Brazilian artist of magnificent colour and geometric shapes – Beatriz Milhazes Maresias:
Then surprised to see Rothko’s Seagram murals – a special plate in my heart for these. They have followed me through life and I never expected them here. The effect is always the same – stunning in a way of silence.
Then, onto the Penlee in Penzance and a rather fine exhibition on Harold Harvey – unusual amongst Cornish artists in actually being Cornish. Sometimes considered a bit boring but I was fascinated. He spanned the C19 and C20 – so, began with Stanhope Forbes idylls and ended up with Do Proctor contemporaneousness:
I check out the Bernard Leach grave stone to Alfred Wallis, who somehow and inadvertedly began the whole St Ives modernist movement:
It’s also time to go on the hunt for prehistoric sites and the like.
Courtyard roundhouses – only found in Penwith – 2000 years old:
Standing stones steeped in cosmological alignment – 4000 years old:
The Cuckoo stone intersects with many – and is probably the most elegant I have come across.
It seems it has a relation in a nearby field, uncovered by CASPN Chair James Kitto:
I then stay in a real ancestral home: St. Just
Before moving to another – Mousehole:
Home:
And, then finally another: St Buryan – the church and some screen woodwork affected by a woodworking relative – Abendigo Harvey:
I also visit ‘the Lizard’ – specifically Church Cove and St. Wynwalloe Church:
Glimpses of Parc Garland, the mansion like home of the mysterious Pamela Colman Smith – artist, storyteller, and designer of the Rider Waite Tarot cards. One may well wonder how from this she ended up dying in near poverty in an apartment in Bude. The full story is yet to be told:
Photos of my books on sale in a bookshop in Argentina, South America from my partner Pablo Mandel:
Play at the National Theatre: Boys from the Blackstuff – an iconic piece about the destruction of the British working class. Of course, m it also gave us that dramatic legend, Yosser Hughes:
I have been reading Henry Bortoft and a book on Gurdjieff’s movement/ dances/ ballets:
Music? Well, its summer, so one has to reach for the Beach Boys. This time, Brian Wilson’s 2015 CD Pier Pressure.
This is no Wild Honey or Please Let him Run Wild – still less, Country Air, Surf’s Up or Feel Flows. But, hey, its summer with the ‘mignette’ on your arm, and you are cooling down after a day’s roasting on the beach…..
In truth, most pieces pass in this spirit of the ‘endless’ summer dream.
But hey, then “Last Song”!!!!!!
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=7DO1quz7DF4
Some know that I once argued that the Beach Boys’ oeuvre needed to be understood as an articulation of Heideggerian philosophy:
http://www.michaelgrenfell.co.uk/bourdieu/bourdieu-and-the-beach-boys/