Picasso on the subject of truth

If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme
I saw this quote at an exhibition of the work of Picasso and Cezanne in Aix en Provence. You only need to think about Cezanne’s paintings of Mont St Victoire to understand this. Or think of Picasso’s re-working of the [...]

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Picasso’s Chateau de Vauvenargues

The Chateau de Vauvenargues has never been open to the public before, but for four months this summer it’s possible to visit. I went yesterday and it was wonderful. It really is in a beautiful location as I’m sure the photos above will show. It sits at the foot of Mont Saint Victoire, which Picasso [...]

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Photo-etching

Last week I stepped well out of my comfort zone. As you’ll know if you’ve browsed this blog, I am a keen photographer. However, that’s really the limit of my artistic endeavor. I have no sense of myself as an artist and drawing, painting and other creative arts feel as foreign to me as foreign [...]

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Learn to yearn

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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Penn Reading Project

The University of Pennsylvania usually sets a book for their new students to read over the summer before term begins. It’s a way of introducing their freshmen to academic life. This year, however, they’ve set a painting to be studied instead of a book.
They’ve chosen the local artist, Thomas Eakins and his 1875 painting “The [...]

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The need to fit in, and the need to be different

Everyone has to deal with this paradox – how can I preserve my individuality, yet not be isolated? I think of it as a spectrum, with individuality at one end of the line, and shared membership of a group at the other. Our immune systems are designed to recognise anything that is “not me” and [...]

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Patterns

Whether its due to synchronicity or something about focus, attention and awareness, I find that I often have the experience that something I’ve been reading about crops up in all kinds of places. At the moment it’s pattern-spotting. In fact, this pattern-spotting theme is a fundamental one for me. I think it’s an important part [...]

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Infectious disease

The treatment of infectious diseases is often presented as one of the great success stories of modern medicine. There’s no doubt that antibiotics have the potential to kill many bacteria in life threatening situations and so have saved many lives. Antivirals don’t have as good a success rate as antibiotics (despite the strange current craze [...]

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Light on the land

I love the way landscape changes with shifting sunlight.
When I was walking around Jupiter Artland the other day, I noticed that through a gap in the forest I could see what’s known as The Three Sisters. These are the remains of “bings” from coal mining in West Lothian.
Look how the colour of the land changes [...]

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Sunlight on web

I love the way the sunbeams sneaked through the leaves of the trees and lit up this web….

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