Winchester Flower Festival 2018

The Flower Festival was held in the Cathedral beginning on 5th September 2018, with the theme of the Winchester Bible.

For more photos, click here

For comparison, see the 'Cascades' exhibition of modern arrangements held in 2015.

Art and What it Means to Me

Turner

Reflecting on having visited three local art exhibitions this week, I thought to put down what I think about art.




First, my credentials in talking about this at all: I am not an artist, although I have been a photographer since my 20s and have long had an interest in gardening and garden design.

I studied History of Art under Graham Drew at Winchester and loved it. Since then I have visited many of the world's great galleries - some many times for different exhibitions - including in the UK the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate, the Tate Modern, the Royal Academy, the Wallace Collection, the Saatchi, the V&A, and many smaller galleries such as the Tate St Ives as well as exhibitions such as the St Laurent / Pierre Berge collection put on by Christies. Abroad, I know the Louvre, the Chagall and Matisse Museums in Nice, the Prado, the Ufizzi, Topkai, MOMA, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Palace Museum of Taiwan, the National Museum and the Palace Museum, Beijing, MOMAT (the Museum of Modern art, Tokyo) and the Miho Museum near Kyoto.

My interest in art comes fundamentally from its ability to induce a feeling of transcendence, of awe, of reverence, of amazement, of significance. William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience' wrote: “Our normal waking consciousness… is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.”

Viginia Woolf expressed it thus: ...'behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself'.

Or as Saul Bellow put it in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech “Only art penetrates.. the seeming realities of this world”

I love and look for this glorious penetration, this heightening of consciousness, this revelation and this significance. I don't often find it.

“The dark second-floor apartment of the house in Market Square was shot through each day by the naked heat of summer: the silence of the shimmering streaks of air, the squares of brightness dreaming their intense dreams on the floor.” - Bruno Schultz

I realise that my somewhat over-blown thoughts above are not really appropriate to deal with 'everyday' art - the kind sold in local galleries and hung hopefully in church halls - and it's somewhat unfair to hold that kind of art to the standards of the old and recent masters (although I wish I would ove meet someone who lived for their art and at least aspired to that standard).

To help me with this, and thanks to Maria Popova (again), I recently discovered Henry Miller's 'To Paint Is To Love Again', which he reads in its entirety here. One passage has been especially useful:

'To paint is to love again. It’s only when we look with eyes of love that we see as the painter sees. His is a love, moreover, which is free of possessiveness. What the painter sees he is duty-bound to share. Usually he makes us see and feel what ordinarily we ignore or are immune to. His manner of approaching the world tells us, in effect, that nothing is vile or hideous, nothing is stale, flat and unpalatable unless it be our own power of vision. To see is not merely to look. One must look-see. See into and around'.

I will henceforth adopt such a kindly and love-infused eye for the art that I see around me every day, while keeping the works of the masters always as a bath of pure joy.   

   

Favourite Gardens - The Buildings in August 2018

Some scenes from my favourite garden, and the inspiration for the grass garden at Old Swan House

For more photos, click here

See also The Buildings, Sept 2014

The Patience Of Ordinary Things

Painting by Emily Patrick

See also Emily Patrick's Exhibition in Spitalfields November 2008

Patience of Ordinary Things

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

Pat Schneider

Old Swan House Garden in August 2018

The garden photographed in early "Chinese" autumn

The grass garden at evening

The grass garden at evening - Lumix wide

The long view with 'orse

The long view

The grass garden at a distance

Drinks in the sun

The drive borders

There's still a lot going on

The wildflower fence glimpsed from the loggia

Old Swan House Garden in July 2018

On one of the hottest driest summers on record, the garden has stood up well.

Come in....to the smallest fenced wildflower meadow ever...

The wildflower meadow at the end of the path

 

The helenium is especially fine this year

The box balls have stood up well to the heat

The grass garden in full somg 

The wall border after Ispahan is over

The helenium and the lower wall border

Echinacea love the heat

The new box pyramids have added to the 'weight' at this end of the garden

The house with its wall of box 0 with the new box walk behind the tree

Hampton Court Flower Show 2018

Hampton Court

Visiting Hampton Court Flower Show again after many years was a pleasure in many ways, not least because on a very warm day much of the area was shaded by trees and there were plenty of places to sit down as well as to eat and drink, unlike Chelsea.  The surroundings are of course magnificent and it's a joy not have to drive in and out of London, but the show still has gardens of good quality, though more modest both in number and design.

For more photos, click here 

Mottisfont Rose Garden June 2018

Viktoria Gul working in the rose garden

Blairii No 1

For more photos, click here 

NGS Evening at the Harold Hiller Garden June 2018

For more photos, click here

Old Swan House Garden in June 2018

That garden is now almost at its peak in early June. The euphorbia no longer dominate as they have suffered the 'Chelsea Chop' but the roses have suddenly all come out and Mme Alfred Carriere is scrambling up the neighbour's yew, the roses having been properly pruned and tied back for the first time this winter.

The grasses have grown quickly after their hard pruning in March and the mounds of alchemilla have become astonishingly large. The fireworks of Stipa gigantea dominate at the moment before Miscanthus Professor Richard Hansen takes over as the tallest grass, becoming a golden searchlight in the autumn.

The wildflower meadow - probably the smallest in the country to be enclosed with estate fencing - is brimming with plants and has had had an additional supply of oxeye daisy and - hopefully - some teazle added to the mix, which now surrounds an old staddle stone.

The horse surveys the top of the garden and the addition box balls and pyramids

There is new box walk around the pond that looks particularly good lit up at night.

Only the lawns are a disappointment this year, but should soon be brought back to lush greeness.

For more photos, click here

For a video walk-through, click here

See also Blithe Moment


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