‘Blue is the colour, football is the game, we’re all together, and winning is our aim, so cheer us on trough the sun and rain because Chelsea, Chelsea is our name!’ Blue is one of those colours, like red, which has huge cultural connotations. whether it be for Chelsea football supporters or for those travelling […]
With recent exhibitions on female artists such as Bridget Riley at David Zwirner and Paulo Rega at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, with Hugh Mendes’s exhibition at Charlie Smith London reinforcing the contribution of female artists through recent centuries, is there still a need in 2020 for an art exhibitions focused exlusively on […]
Stuck indoors during the current health crisis? You never known, you might find a new and different career. Scottish comedian and musician Billy Connolly shows us the way. Stuck in a hotel in Montreal on a rainy day, he decided to take up drawing, something that he admits he was not very good at when […]
The S|2 gallery in London, which is part of, but across the road from, Sotheby’s main auction house, curates a programme of unusual and often relatively-unknown modern artists with the best exhibitions showing two different artists side by side who compliment and/or contrast with each other through the two floors of galleries in the modern building […]
Moving from David Hockney at Annely Juda across Mayfair, in what would now be deserted streets, to Brigit Riley, another great British artist from that generation, David Zwirner was showing several of her works from the 1980′s and 1990′s alongside a parallel exhibition of work from the last years of the abstract artist Paul Klee, […]
What is it about art that inspires artists to continue to be creative and to experiment even when they are still in their 80′s. In Britain, the best artists from that generation are still experimenting with new ideas, including Bridget Riley (born 1931), Peter Blake (born 1932), Patrick Hughes (born 1939) and David Hockney (born […]
Although it looks like an old traditional pub, apparently it is a relatively modern conversion of a former shop. If so, the transformation has been well done and The Reliance feels like it has been here for ever, not least because of the rickety wooden staircase that runs up the side of the building from […]
The neo-classical temple that now houses the Royal Scottish Academy, built by the architect William Henry Playfair in 1822-6 and extended in 1831-6 for the Board of Manufactures and Fisheries, is one of those classical buildings which contributed to the reputation of Edinburgh as the ‘Athens of the North’. Sitting alongside another neoclassical temple – […]
There are two observatories in Edinburgh, the Royal Observatory on Blackford Hill and the City Observatory up on Calton Hill, along with monuments to Nelson, Dugald Stewart and Robert Burns and the unfinished National Monument with a predominant Greek architectural style reinforcing Edinburgh’s title of ‘Athens of the North’. The history of the two observatories […]
Hidden down the cobbled streets of the New Town of Edinburgh is the former Meeting House of the Glasites, a Scottish religious sect of followers of John Glas (1695-1773), who was removed from the Church of Scotland ministry in 1730 for his beliefs. The first Glasite church was founded in Dundee and the Edinburgh church […]
"The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul."
(Thomas Moore)
To be an architect means having a wide range of interests - architecture, art and creativity in all its variety of forms, sustainability, science and innovation. The greatest interest is often where these different worlds overlap and collide - that is when something imaginative often occurs that pushes us all forward to another place
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