Thank you very much to everyone who came to the gallery on Saturday for the latest opening. A special thanks to artists Akiko Hirai, Linda Felcey and Rebecca Campbell, for giving us such beautiful work with which to adorn the gallery’s walls, nooks and alcoves. It was a gorgeous start to the day to herald a new exhibition, the slanting October sun illuminating a land and city-scape washed by rain. Catching the early train from Avoncliff…
‘Earth has not any thing to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!’
– William Wordsworth ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’
By the time I got to the gallery the light was streaming in through the windows on York Street, turning the biggest of Akiko’s extra large moon jar into a craggy shadow-streaked sun-bathed apparition…
Akiko Hirai 94. Extra Large Moon Jar Ceramic 70 x 64 cm. £12,000
Since Saturday things have become a little more sodden, and not a little colder. We will now not see another post 6 o’clock sunset until March ! In memory of Louise Gluck, her poem ‘Snowdrops’.
Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you.
I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again in the cold light of earliest spring–
afraid, yes, but among you again crying yes risk joy
in the raw wind of the new world.
The Arrival of Autumn, Oil on Linen 122 x 91 cm. £9,500
Linda Felcey’s quiet still lifes are punctuate the sheer variety and vitality of Akiko’s pots…
Bloom Bloom, Oil on Linen 20 x 26 cm. £850
And finaly…and not for the first, second or third time..
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
‘The Peace of Wild Things’ by Wendell Berry
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