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Also known as umbrella pines or parasol pines, the proper name for these iconic Roman trees is Pinus pinea, photographed here in 2018, and looking like streamers of greenish smoke or low-lying clouds. Amazing things.
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This moment in my blogging year does remind me a bit of when I used to put all my beloved He-Man figures on display, so I could just sit back with a purring of pleasure, satisfied by the simple act of amassing stuff: or when VHS was a thing, running my fingertip across all the…
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Welcome to this anniversary edition of The Kick-About – a fortnightly creative challenge in which a loose community of artists make new works in a short time in response to a specific prompt. Gathered here, and in no particular order, are selections from one year’s worth of online exhibitions, with works inspired by a richly…
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More spooky goings-on in the Old French House from 2015. ‘Let’s get outta here, Scoobs…’
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Despite my best efforts, these photographs taken from deep within a hillside field of rapeseed do not do proper justice to the sensorial experience of being surrounded by this furnace of the colour at sun set. You can quickly run out of synonyms for the colour yellow.
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My imagination attached itself to these lines in part two of T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land (an excerpt of which being the prompt for The Kick-About No.77): ‘In vials of ivory and coloured glass / Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes / Unguent, powdered, or liquid’. I got this immediate mental impression of colour, specularity…
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We spent our last Kick-About together riffing on a surrealistic painting by Lucian Freud – a depiction of a strange artificial-seeming room filled with improbable objects and an air of unfinished business. Courtesy of an extract from part two of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, we’re this week occupants of another theatrical interior, as ripe…
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Taken back in the early Summer of 2020, an astonishing expanse of oxeye daisies in an otherwise overlooked field, where both the light and the breeze produced lovely, impressionistic effects. A magical space.
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There’s that quote from the movie, Forrest Gump, that famously goes: ‘Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get’. Well, The Kick-About is like that too, so I’m not going to say too much about my response this week, except to say it could only have come as…
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Our last Kick-About was inspired by Bosch’s painting, The Garden Of Earthly Delights, famous for the unknowability of many of its signs, symbols, allegories and imagery. No less perplexing perhaps is this week’s jumping-off point, a painting by Lucian Freud that shares little with his unflinching representations of the human body, and much more with…
Red's Kingdom 