Ogden & Chalmers
June 30, 2011 § 3 Comments
John Neville
June 27, 2011 § Leave a Comment
John Neville has been praised as a master printmaker, folk artist, and fantastic storyteller.
The subjects of Neville’s distinct artwork are the fishermen of his village of Halls Harbor in Nova Scotia.
His simple style thoughtfully portrays these men in their daily tasks, a lifestyle that is becoming more and more rare. A subject that might be thought unglamorous becomes magical in the brilliant colors and shapes that Neville creates.
He finds beauty in the Nova Scotia land and ocean and in the local people.
Chloe Harrison
May 9, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Chloe Harrison’s design workshop, Studio Gnu, produces sculptural textile products for interiors.
This month she has a stuffed stag, ram and fox head on display. But rather than gutting and stitching real dead animals, the artist used Harris Tweed to make her creations alongside their real horns.
Harrison, who previously worked for Glasgow design firm Timorous Beasties, plans to create fake taxidermy of dodos, lions and rhinos too. Her stag head costs £3000 and took a month to make.
Studio Gnu launched its latest releases in its Scottish Collection at Collect at the Saatchi Gallery but today is the last day. So hurry.
Far Out…
May 6, 2011 § 2 Comments
Suddenly fed up with city life and New York, Tomi Ungerer and his wife Yvonne, set out in search of a simpler life. They ended up on an isolated peninsula in Nova Scotia, Canada. The nearest town was two miles away and it was three years before they had a road to the house built, so it offered them the chance to create a totally different life for themselves.
While they were there Ungerer continued to paint and write but he also learnt how to be a farmer, a herdsman and, where necessary, a butcher, because without ever intending to establish a farm they gradually acquired sheep, chickens, ducks, geese, rabbits, goats, cows, pigs and horses.
In his diary, Ungerer describes in vivid detail their trials, tribulations and at times downright bizarre life on the isolated peninsula. Carefully observed drawings of the landscape, the wild animals, their own domestic flock and bring his words to life and create a distinctive impression of the wild and a times bleak landscape.
Originally published in 1983, Far Out isn’t Far Enough is now reissued in a beautifully designed edition to introduce a new audience to Tomi Ungerer’s evocative style of drawing and writing.
Anne Campbell
March 18, 2011 § 1 Comment
Anne Campbell was born and brought up in Bragar, on the Isle of Lewis.
She studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating with First Class Honours and a Distinction at post-graduate level, and lived in Edinburgh and the Isle of Harris before returning to Bragar ten years ago. She recently graduated from Edinburgh University with an MSc with Distinction in Archaeology. Her dissertation subject was the north Lewis moorland: the work was based on a field survey of the water catchment area of the bay at the present-day village of Bragar.
‘The Lewis landscape can be seen as a palimpsest: features representing human activity over millennia exist side by side and laid on top of each other, with the same sites and materials re-used over and over again. As well as these physical remains there is a dense network of place-names, songs and stories connected with each part of the landscape.
I work extensively from sketches done while out walking, trying to get a feeling of the immediacy of being outside in the fresh air alongside birds, sheep and other creatures. I am also interested in communicating a sense of the significance that the people of the island have attached, and still attach, to the land, by incorporating traditional verse and place-lore into my work.’
Elizabeth Bishop
March 15, 2011 § 1 Comment
Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. When she was very young her father died, her mother was committed to a mental asylum, and she was sent to live with her grandparents in Nova Scotia. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Vassar College in 1934.
She was independently wealthy, and from 1935 to 1937 she spent time traveling to France, Spain, North Africa, Ireland, and Italy and then settled in Key West, Florida, for four years. Her poetry is filled with descriptions of her travels and the scenery which surrounded her, as with the Florida poems in her first book of verse,North and South, published in 1946.
She was influenced by the poet Marianne Moore, who was a close friend, mentor, and stabilizing force in her life. Unlike her contemporary and good friend Robert Lowell, who wrote in the “confessional” style, Bishop’s poetry avoids explicit accounts of her personal life, and focuses instead with great subtlety on her impressions of the physical world.
Her images are precise and true to life, and they reflect her own sharp wit and moral sense. She lived for many years in Brazil, communicating with friends and colleagues in America only by letter. She wrote slowly and published sparingly (her Collected Poems number barely a hundred), but the technical brilliance and formal variety of her work is astonishing. For years she was considered a “poet’s poet,” but with the publication of her last book, Geography III, in 1976, Bishop was finally established as a major force in contemporary literature.
She also painted.
Liam Stevens
March 11, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Liam Stevens is an illustrator and designer based in London.
Employing the visual qualities of pencil and cut paper, he likes to playfully engage in creating work over a range of disciplines.
Old photographs, ships, postcards, travel and typography are recurrent themes within his work.
Nostalgia and memory are frequently explored in the identity of his illustrations often in the context of a more contemporary aesthetic.
Leah Fusco
March 9, 2011 § 3 Comments
Leah Fusco recently graduated from the Royal College of Art and continues her practice as an image-maker through illustration, painting and moving image. Her work explores landscape and culture, with a focus on the relationship between past and present. She is also a lecturer at University for the Creative Arts, Maidstone.
