English Landscape Sculpted

Image courtesy of Cowley Manor © Amy Murrell

This summer, make your way to Cowley Manor, a country house hotel in the Cotswolds, where eight graduate students from the Royal College of Art have temporarily installed their site-specific sculptures.

Strolling the grounds, you might see an eight-foot-tall wire tornado frozen mid-swirl on one of the lower lakes, or the word H-E-Y spelled out like a truncated version of the Hollywood sign at the foot of a grassy meadow. The latter, conceived by Wonwoo Lee, has won the juror’s prize and will permanently remain at Cowley Manor. Also, be sure to keep an eye out for Cradeaux Alexander’s amusing installation of “garden plaques with a twist” throughout the grounds. In front of a wooded trail is a sign declaring “A Path of Unusual Morals” and adjacent to a nearby shrub, “A Bush of Great Character.”

The RCA/Coutts sculpture exhibition will be on view until September 3rd and is open to hotel and restaurant guests as well as picnic goers.

17th Century Private Museums Revealed

A new exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC features rare and meticulously rendered catalogues of private collections dating from the 16th and 17th centuries. The documentation includes detailed engravings reproducing the works of art, natural history, and curiosities of these wealthy and sophisticated collectors. Some of the catalogues even include views of the museum rooms and galleries, offering a peek at their curatorial sensibility.

Collections Frozen in Time
Selections from the National Gallery of Art Library
February 5-July 24, 2011

Rethinking the Pavilion

This summer, the 2010 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London's Kensington Gardens has been designed by French archititect Jean Nouvel. The period from invitation to completion was only six months for this fabulous creation. The temporary structure opened on July 13 and will be open to visit and enjoy until October 17. Admission is free.

Click here for more info and photographs.

Photograph: John Offenbach

Still Life Distilled

In her recent work, photographer Sharon Core has beautifully rendered still life paintings in the style of Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825), one of America's early masters in this genre.

His still life paintings featured perfectly articulated everyday objects: ceramic tableware, glassware, fruit and flowers.

Core has recreated Peale's tableaus with collected antique serving pieces, vegetables and ripened fruits. Her brilliant attention to composition, scale, color and lighting produce a visual feast for modern and traditional tastes alike.



More images from Sharon Core's "Early American" series may be found here and here.

Love and Color Rising

German born artist Horst Glasker is not only a painter. His art includes his music, performance, sculpture, installation, and architecture. This project of color, architecture and words was created in 2006 in Wuppertal, Germany on the Holstein, steps built in 1900. It is called "La Scala" the Italian word for stairs.

Each colorful step has also been painted on the front with a word describing human relationships. There are 112 steps and they've painted to represent the course of a relationship. They are painted on a color related to the emotion and the text appears in a complementary color. In translation, they include such terms as: friendship, forgive, remorse, protect, jubilant, honor, family, fear, innocence, cuddle, mother, loyalty, love.


For more info on the artist, click here and/or here.

Personal Art Gallery

Need a quick decorating fix or just want to bring some of your favorite drawings, photos or clippings out of boxes and into view? Here is a great idea for hanging your choice of two-dimensional art on the wall. With inexpensive and cool looking bullnose clips, you can put together a gallery in little or no time. Start with a handful of clips and make your choices, then hang the art with relatively uniform space between them. For a small collection, try hanging them in a row - horizontally or vertically.