Arts Articles
Robert Spence
Robert Spence was born in Tynemouth in 1871 into a Quaker family and trained as an artist in London and Paris. While he painted in oils, he is best known for his dry-point etchings. Many of his etchings were based on events described in The Journal of George Fox. His style...
Icons
Vaideeni, Romania It’s a long way from gothic-gaunt steeples meant to prod God beyond reach. This one’s a gingerbread loaf. Colours like a country fair, flocks of saints up the walls, rugs, candlelight, grannies in headscarves, golden syrup of polyphonic chanting.
Classic lasagne
Firstly, make the meat sauce warning: this may disturb the supersensitive mask your eyes, muffle your ears bodies explode from planes wars always mangle us indiscriminately life is just like that
Diversity of art at Bath
Celebrating the publication of his thirteenth novel this week, Howard Jacobson wrote ‘To lose oneself in making art – all questions of quality apart – is an incomparable way of living life. Never mind self-expression. The truly wonderful thing about being a painter, a writer or a musician is escaping self.’ It...
Art at Yearly Meeting Gathering
The futility of war
On Friday 1 August Sally Beamish’s Violin Concerto, based on the theme of war, is being given a London premiere at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms season. The programme, commemorating 100 years since the outbreak of the first world war, includes William Walton’s Symphony No.1...
The things which kill
When blinded Polyphemus chose a rock To hurl at bold Odysseus in his flight, His weapon was as one from cave-man’s stock; Its simple function: death to expedite!
Oblation
Wrapped in the silent Quaker hour I see behind closed eyes the lattice of a purple honeycomb. I watch the undulating butterfly draw nectar from the open flower whose shy sense shapes the gift of hidden power.
Not ideas about the war but the war itself
Dad hated those processions: strangulated distant bugles, rifles butting Whitehall tarmac, doleful incantations from the comfortable clergy resurrecting Albert, Chalky and those other lads who ‘grew not old as we that are left grow old’. And then the trumpet keening like a scrawny seagull over downturned heads and surreptitious coughs.
Antonine Legionary
I marched these hills not long ago, I travelled north in search of foe, Wild blue-faced tribes, encountered there, Barbaric people, caused such scare. We captured some, and sent them home, To slavery, in ancient Rome. Though I am Roman, not myself, A Syrian archer, trained in stealth.