(image via {Wit + Delight} )
Tuesday 16 November 2010
Thursday 11 November 2010
Nordic
Nordic Bakery have just opened a second home in Marylebone.
Sara and I had a scandi lunch of gravlax on rye bread but denied ourselves a cinnamon bun. Fools.
Shh
RCA Secret postcard sale. You won't know who the artist is until after you have made your postcard purchase. Over 1,000 artists have donated work from the acclaimed(Grayson Perry, Sir Peter Blake, Sir Paul Smith, photographer David Bailey, film maker Mike Leigh and designers Ron Arad and James Dyson) to the emerging (RCA students).
Friday 5 November 2010
Vic
I love the idea of bespoke. Just something for you. Vic's personalised photo shop (open until tomorrow at midday) is so charming: she is inspired by your name and the feeling it creates before popping a photograph in the post.
Happy weekend all.
(Photos via Vic)
AOC (Agents of Change)
AOC's renovation of a Golder's Green family home. Concrete hearth with a parquet pattern. Spot the rabbit!
The Grand Stack of Notebooks
Archie Grand Notebooks with specfied content.
Architects I met and liked.
Writers I met and liked
Doctors I met and liked
Communists I met and liked (!)
Thursday 4 November 2010
Another Country
My first stop at the London Design Festival's Tramshed event was to Another Country. Since then I've noticed considerable design press coverage for the Dorset based craft furniture designer. A day bed that the Shakers would have approved of.
Likely to inspire a post countryside walk and apple cake snooze.
Face to Face
Such a strange feeling to read about my late grandmother Ruth Borchard and the Face to Face self portrait collection in this week's Time Out!
A (mixed) review of the exhibition at Kings Place
Self-portraits can be morbidly fascinating. It was the introspective nature of the endeavour that prompted the late Ruth Borchard to build a collection of 100 self-portrait paintings and prints by mainly British artists, each bought/commissioned for a maximum of 21 guineas. This selection, spanning 50 years (1921-71) offers welcome glimpses of several key developments in British painting, not least the kitchen sink school. The specificity of Borchard's interest, however, and this lacklustre, frieze-like display make one all too aware of the gaps: those who are not and should be represented here.
Borchard, who fled Hamburg during WWII, was clearly a woman of influence and a hard bargainer. Many decades on, it seems preposterous that artists of Euan Uglow and Roger Hilton's ilk would agree to part with such personal works for so little.The majority were made and bought during the 1950s and '60s, when post-war austerity and social realism ruled. The sobre palettes and serious poses generally reflect this, as opposed to more abstract concerns from across the pond.
Among the many art-school educators (William Coldstream, John Minton), David Bomberg looms large: from certain perspectives around the odd balcony space, there appears enough muddy slap to drown a field of festival revellers and overwhelm the more subtle but significant pieces of this art-historical puzzle. While one might argue that the holes in any collection are as pertinent to the backstory as the works included (the fact that only five women artists made the pack speaks volumes), one tends to rely on Borchard's accounts of her dealings with the artists as tonal chart to match these p‚té-hued views on the past.
A (mixed) review of the exhibition at Kings Place
Self-portraits can be morbidly fascinating. It was the introspective nature of the endeavour that prompted the late Ruth Borchard to build a collection of 100 self-portrait paintings and prints by mainly British artists, each bought/commissioned for a maximum of 21 guineas. This selection, spanning 50 years (1921-71) offers welcome glimpses of several key developments in British painting, not least the kitchen sink school. The specificity of Borchard's interest, however, and this lacklustre, frieze-like display make one all too aware of the gaps: those who are not and should be represented here.
Borchard, who fled Hamburg during WWII, was clearly a woman of influence and a hard bargainer. Many decades on, it seems preposterous that artists of Euan Uglow and Roger Hilton's ilk would agree to part with such personal works for so little.The majority were made and bought during the 1950s and '60s, when post-war austerity and social realism ruled. The sobre palettes and serious poses generally reflect this, as opposed to more abstract concerns from across the pond.
Among the many art-school educators (William Coldstream, John Minton), David Bomberg looms large: from certain perspectives around the odd balcony space, there appears enough muddy slap to drown a field of festival revellers and overwhelm the more subtle but significant pieces of this art-historical puzzle. While one might argue that the holes in any collection are as pertinent to the backstory as the works included (the fact that only five women artists made the pack speaks volumes), one tends to rely on Borchard's accounts of her dealings with the artists as tonal chart to match these p‚té-hued views on the past.
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