Born in 1954. Chequered career including Lecturer in English, Social Worker and Lecturer in Social Work. Had breaks related to mental health that also meant I worked in social care. Now retired.
Developing a research topic: Working up to TMA05 A844 What is the working title of your dissertation (initially formulated as a question)? Following feedback on TMA04: How can Vaughan’s Assembly of Figures paintings be seen as the efforts of a gay artist to negotiate expectations of the purpose of art within post-war British painting? New Rethink (possible – to … More Keith Vaughan: Queering the Assembly?
The reader is suddenly the read, the storyteller the one listening: Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise (2019) I don’t think I understand the power of Mark Haddon’s work very well but I’m sure, since I read The Red House, the most undervalued book of the last decade, that the path to understanding has something to do … More The reader is suddenly the read, the storyteller the one listening: Mark Haddon’s ‘The Porpoise’ (2019)
I was always fascinated by the lines in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that follow: Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant 209 Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants Why is Eugenides so fabulously identified as a Greek and why a Greek from Graecia Magna, Smyrna? Usually they are glossed in terms of the reference that follows to … More BLOG: What is a world literature? What is the world in Literature?: Beginning to read the first chapters of Mark Haddon’s ‘The Porpoise’.
Here are two stunning artists. I loved the Tanning show – not as popular as the Bonnard one. Hence you could see the installations, soft sculptures and paintings so much more easily than Bonnards’s canvases. The show is brilliantly curated with an excellent film showing at its terminus. Yet for me the comparison involved in … More Dorothea Tanning and Bonnard seen together at Tate Modern
Edvard Munch: Love and Angst at The British Museum Seen 03/05/2019 The British Museum is a great curator of prints and this shows in their wonderful catalogue to this show. However, I felt that the show itself added little to the stupendous contribution of the catalogue. Of course it is wonderful to see the prints … More ‘Edvard Munch: Love and Angst’ at The British Museum Seen 03/05/2019
THE EY Van Gogh & Britain Exhibition: Tate Britain Seen 02/05/2019 Let’s get the worst over. Seeing this exhibition is a nightmare if like me you are appalled by the victory of ineffective management processing of large numbers of people over curatorial innovation – the numbers distract and overwhelm as thousands press towards each painting … More THE EY ‘Van Gogh & Britain’ Exhibition: Tate Britain Seen 02/05/2019
The CC Land Pierre Bonnard exhibition Tate Modern visited 03/05/2019 I felt a lot of fear visiting here. The over-crowding was evident and disturbing and definitely detracted from an experience that was otherwise worthy of being waited for – to see some of the most intriguing and wonderful paintings of the twentieth-century for yourself. So … More The CC Land ‘Pierre Bonnard’ exhibition Tate Modern visited 03/05/2019
Rosmerholm Duke of York’s Theatre Seen 03/05/2019 This wonderful play shimmers with all the lights and darks of great theatre – wonderfully adapted text, brilliant direction and staging from design to lighting to on-stage-proxemics. You also wonder – how will they do the flood? Answer: here brilliantly! And the acting is tremendous. Tom Burke looks … More Ibsen’s ‘Rosmerholm’ Duke of York’s Theatre Seen 03/05/2019
This was a long-awaited treat that more than met its promise. The show has set out to find the ‘nude’ meaningful and, as a result given food for thought on so much that mattered to the European Renaissance and beyond. Issues of gender, truth, the notion of design as either divine or human or both, … More ‘The Renaissance Nude’ Royal Academy visited 02/05/2019
This book appears to me to the best of the tradition of a scholarly art-history without (and indeed taking great prudential care not to try) breaking any boundaries. It is a fine piece of truth-telling in the best scholarly tradition that employs reflexive caution wisely and well – particularly in making the reader as fully … More Reviewing Nudes Again: Burke, Jill (2018) Italian Renaissance Nudes New Have & London, Yale University Press.
List of figures referred to below: E Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, AH281 (1958)Oil on hardboard 88.9 x 120.7 cm. Bradford Museums and Galleries. Available at: https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-martyrdom-of-saint-sebastian-23516 (Accessed 27/04/19) F Assembly of Figures, AKA First Assembly of Figures, AH129 (1952)Oil on board 142.2 x 116.8 cm. Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich. Available at: http://www.thekeithvaughansociety.com/2016/11/24/first-assembly-figures-1952/ (Accessed … More Thinking about a piece of work on Keith Vaughan
This is a beginning book list before I finish writing the 2000 word assignment. It will be the bones of the bibliography for the work – minus annotations. I started by annotating works that were easy to annotate but have read all of them once they were included. Some titles are self-explanatory (*). The real … More Final version of some annotated references for a project on May 1968 in Paris.
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