Pentecost – it seems so strange celebrating Pentecost and the giving of the Holy Spirit with all our churches closed. Anyway we enjoyed a beautiful service filmed in our local church of St Mary Magdalene, in Adlestrop, complete with a special appearance from Buster the Adlestrop cat. It was a triumph for those who produced…
Category: Painting of the Month
May Painting of the Month
VE Day (Victory in Europe) celebrates the day, seventy five years ago, that Europe crawled out of the Second World War, as Germany unconditionally surrendered, following Adolf Hitler’s suicide in a Berlin bunker days earlier. We will celebrate the occasion, May 8th, this Friday with a bank holiday. Will it feel any different to Thursday…
Easter Day – St Giles Oxford
Welcome everyone to a very sunny Easter in lockdown. I thought a modern painting might be appropriate. I have always recommended to people to see The Menorah if they are visiting Oxford. Roger Wagner, like Giotto seven hundred years earlier, chose to represent this most Christian of images using contemporary language. The cooling towers, which…
Maha Rukab – Psalm 91
Cooped up in solitary confinement with a cough and sneezes. Bliss. The Galleries, Museums and libraries are all shut.Thought I might send out a few cheerful images over the next few days and weeks. This one from Psalm 91, one of the very beautiful bits of scripture.
March Painting of the Month
Monet’s Rough Sea at Étretat has very evocative feelings for me. His 1883 painting of the cliffs at the Normandy village of Étretat was one of his regular views. Étretat is a place with memories of summer, having visited several times, but the stormy seas reminds me of the current weather with its succession of…
February Painting of the Month
Brexit; now there’s a word you don’t hear very often. Now we have cast ourselves away from Europe I thought I would post an image that evokes memories of starting a journey to a new exciting world,while still having a longing for the old (you may not all agree with this diehard European!) Ford Madox…
Painting of the Month – January
2020, a new decade, maybe an allegory of perfect vision. I thought I might start the new decade with a peer back a hundred years to 1920 and celebrate that great but complicated British artist, Sir Stanley Spencer. My Painting of the month is The Bridge from that year. Spencer brings the excitement of the…
January Painting of the Month
2020, a new decade, maybe an allegory of perfect vision. I thought I might start the new decade with a peer back a hundred years to 1920 and celebrate that great but complicated British artist, Sir Stanley Spencer. My Painting of the month is The Bridge from that year. Spencer brings the excitement of the…
December Painting of the Month
Christmas looks like it is here again with trees and baubles everywhere. Italy is a little behind the U.K. in decorations but still good to see the trees and lights appearing here after the disastrous floods last month. Having seen so many biblical pictures recently I thought I would choose a different theme for my…
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
“Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.” Immortal lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great poem of 1834, which I enjoyed and still remember class reading at school. So with me flitting back and forth between Venice and North Gloucestershire floods, I thought an…
