tristram hillier, in no particular order, following clare simmonds' find ...

zaha hadid moves on ...

Two days after Zaha Hadid’s untimely death, I’d been trying and failing to remember many details of an extended interview about her life that she recently gave on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.  Not much had lodged in my memory except for the impression of a passionate and determined woman with an exceptionally strong and capacious mind. 

Then last night, in dreamland, I found myself in the unlit Chapter House at Wells Cathedral, with a party of old friends, all exactly as I remembered them even though some are long since vanished; and although we’d never met, I wasn’t surprised to see Zaha Hadid among the group, now settled on a long bench that somehow reminded me of that pile of stone goddesses looted from the Parthenon and displayed in the British Museum.

They were being entertained by a group of standing minstrels, maybe troubadours, colourfully dressed.  They seemed to be a combination of Roxy Music c. 1972 and Piero della Francesca’s angelic musicians present at the Nativity, painted c. 1475.

I don’t remember what the band were playing in this dream but I do remember their heavenly glitz, especially the various lutes and citherns and a Bo Diddly square guitar, and every single instrument being enveloped in thin blue and gold Pentecostal flames.

compare and contrast ... went to see "botticelli re-imagined" at the V&A today ... and was somewhat perversely reminded of reginald marsh, and william blake

... reginald marsh ...



















... and william blake, too !

3BT, 25th March 2016

In the wee small hours, the funfair on Clapham Common stands in darkness, a broken silhouette against the trees and the city’s orange night sky … except for one small ride, a childrens’ roundabout at the edge of the compound, where an engineer is working alone and is just switching on the pastel coloured lights, pale blue, pale pink, pale lilac, pale green … “girly gorgeous”, like corals and anemones in a sea of shadows.

Coming up the stairs from a basement lunch at the back of Itsu in Piccadilly, I glance along the shiny floor towards the wide windows and the sunlit street.  For a second the world seems black and white.  And for a second the silhouetted girl between me and the door might be a lovely lovely girl I knew thirty years ago.

In the Wellcome Foundation’s  States Of Mind exhibition they have a line of framed drawings by the Spaniard, Santiago Ramon y Cajal.  These are on scraps of paper and card, painstakingly rendered in pen and ink to depict forms and structures for which there were no previous conventions or stereotypes to build on, and which demanded a kind or truthfulness, sensitivity and delicacy,  that only the most dedicated artists achieve.

spain's other great artist of the twentieth century ... santiago ramon y cajal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_Ram%C3%B3n_y_Cajal

some of his drawings are currently displayed in the wellcome collection on euston road

the shock and pleasure of finding these delicate and perceptive analytical sketches is as great as if you had just walked in to his laboratory and found one besides his microscope