Bringing the garden inside: textile artist Caroline Nixon grows her own designs
THE Cotswolds is a honeypot for artists: there they all are, tucked into its dips and folds, working away in their barns, sheds and garden studios. From Judith Yarrow (www.judithyarrow.com), painting what she sees on walks around her Chipping Norton home and making enchanting sketchbooks for her grandchildren of things we like doing', to Pip Shuckburgh (http://pipshuckburgh.co.uk) and her very English scenes—choirboys outside a honey-coloured church, Edwardian figures en fête on the lawn of a country pile, like Lowry meets Tottering-by-Gentlythere is much creativity here.
Fifteen months of lockdown were undoubtedly hard for artists, with galleries closed and exhibitions postponed. However, it also delivered some unexpected opportunities. Charlbury-based Elaine Kazimierczuk (www.elainekazimierczuk.com) had planned to spend last summer visiting wildflower meadows. Instead, she posted an invitation via the hashtag #paintmymeadow on social media and her inbox was soon filled with a host of images from around the country, resulting in joyfully vivid paintings.
Eleanor Campbell (www.eleanorcampbell.art) used those sequestered weeks to wander the fields around her Kingham home with a knapsack containing Posca pens, watercolour pencils, paper and a little stool. 'Lockdown was my saving,' she recalls.
Instead of going shopping for new materials, Broadway artist Jeremy Houghton painted new work over old canvases, whereas glassmaker Nigel Calvert, unable to visit his foundry, sat on the banks of the River Severn producing a series of large paintings 'in multiple shades of blue'.
The botanical textile artist
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
