Arts Articles
Sing out
Afew thoughts have come to me and have combined into a prompting. I have been impressed (as usual) by the high standard of music playing and, in particular, of singing (solo, duet and choir) at the 2016 Welsh Eisteddfodau. This reflects the time and effort put in, the value attached to...
Images of Christ: (Non)violent upheaval?
In selecting works for this series, I didn’t want them all to be safely immured in churches, or in museums and art galleries. But it has to be said that Christ driving the Moneychangers from the Temple hasn’t fared too well outside them. It’s down some steps...
Essex girls
I’m an Essex girl And I don’t care what you think, Essex girls are great fun-makers, Jolly hockey sticks! Give us a wink!
Images of Christ: Twelve encounters with Jesus
If you live within reach of London, you have less than a month to hotfoot it round to the British Museum, and, in their ‘South Africa: The art of a nation’ exhibition, see one of the most surprising religious images of the late twentieth century.
Images of Christ: Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
Before Christmas I was lucky enough to see, in Edinburgh, Johannes Vermeer’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary in the Scottish National Gallery. It confirmed to me the idea of this series. My choices, in selecting twelve images of Christ, are bound to be personal, so where...
The Cause
There is a cause worth fighting for, its name is Truth and Peace, Not many care to join the fight, that would see suffering cease. For this would mean compassion, from hearts grown hard and cold, Many tales abound, of course, of those who reach for gold.
Aleppo
Aleppo will never mean beauty again. Never mean rivers and mosques, hanging gardens, shaded courtyards, where old men rest, where women laugh and children play under trees, where young girls sing and writers dream of yesterday and tomorrow and artists paint their dreams. Green turned to grey, gold to dust,...
Hoar frost
Hoar frost, petrified hedgerows, shivering, crow alert guarding country lanes, hidden from all but local view.
Christmas rhyme
Deck the universal mess in brittle tinsel! ’Tis the season for a public pantomime Two-thousand-and-sixteen reasons to be cheerful – ho! ho! Scramble into this year’s Christmas rhyme. It’s the season for unreasonable reverting, Fix the hinges, put up beds for dad and mam, Prepare to face the feast...
Hallelujah
A meditation on Christmas, set to the metre of the late Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ There is a story very old about some shepherds in the cold who say they saw an angelic host before them. The angels told them of a birth that God had come to visit Earth...