Monday 20 December 2010

The Do Lectures: Alex Haws 'Invite Stranger to Dinner'

The Do lectures from last year are still being uploaded even as the next Do lectures are being planned for 2011.

Every year, Howies the Welsh clothing manufacturers (not how they would describe themselves) invite a people to West Wales to come and talk about what they Do.
"They can be small Do's or big Do's or just plain amazing extraordinary Do's. But when you listen to their stories, they just light a fire in your belly to go and Do your thing, your passion, the thing that sits in the back your head each day, just waiting, and waiting for you to follow your heart.
To go find your cause to fight for, your company to go start, your invention to invent, your book to write, your mountain to climb".
See Alex Haws in a regrettable suit describe the house he designed in Battersea for a gardener. The staircase is exquisitely beautiful , made using a computer programme that allowed him to draw the lines that drove the machine that cut the parts.

Monday 13 December 2010

Music, fairy stories, folk practices and ghostly tales from Scotland

Calum playing the pipes (1972) © School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh.Bothy ballads, love songs, children's rhymes, laments and songs composed by village poets along with fairy stories, historical legends and tales of ghosts and kelpies. Birth, life and death customs and work practices , if these things interest you then check out
More than 15,000 recordings from Scotland's past are available online on the oral archive, Tobar an Dualchais. The recordings, from all parts of the country,  some dating back more than eight decades, are drawn from the archives of the School of Scottish Studies, the BBC and the National Trust for Scotland's Canna Collection.

Friday 3 December 2010

Dulwich Picture Gallery's anniversary celebrations

Dulwich Picture Gallery houses one of the world's most important collections of European old master paintings of the 1600s and 1700s.The collection is also one of the oldest in Great Britain, substantially put together in the years 1790 to 1795. The paintings are housed in the first purpose-built art gallery in England, designed by Sir John Soane in 1811.
A Girl at a Window (detail), Rembrandt, 1645, Dulwich Picture Gallery collection
 Today the Gallery  announced it was marking its 200th anniversary in 2011 by displaying specially loaned paintings for a month at a time by artists such as Velázquez, El Greco,
Rembrandt, Constable and David Hockney. One of the most eye-catching is the self-portrait of Van Gogh –  for July – from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. A 19-year-old Van Gogh walked from central London to Dulwich Art Gallery in 1873 and made a mess of the visitor's book by blotting ink all over it. Unfortunately all that is known of his experience, said Dejardin, is that he "had a nice day