Thanks to the new verandah, we can sit looking out at the garden in a sub-tropical storm:-

I can’t – annoyingly – remember who it was who recommended I read Olivia Laing’s very brilliant, recently published The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise – a book that I have enjoyed so much I want to thank whoever it was; although I also now realise that I have missed its launch at the Garden Museum, the opening of the garden itself, and a specially organised trip, all in June.  I am too late.

It’s about the garden of the house she and her husband, Ian Patterson, bought in Yoxford, Suffolk, but really a cultural history of gardening: the oppression of the landscape garden and its source in Caribbean wealth; William Morris and his garden at Kelmscott; Eliot Hodgkin’s pictures of wilderness flowers after the blitz; Iris Origo at La Foce; Cedric Morris and Lett Haines at Benton End; the consolation of gardens against fascism and all other forms of oppression.

I can’t recommend it more highly.

I have written before about West Horsley Place where Grange Park Opera relocated in 2017, but not since Charles O’Brien’s excellent revised Pevsner volume was published in 2022. 

I had remembered how atmospheric the crumbly main house is, left unexpectedly by the Duchess of Roxburghe to the late Bamber Gascoigne, her great-nephew, but not how oddly small its gothick front door is, as if it was an accident or after-thought, which indeed it is, put in by Henry Weston who inherited the house in 1749. 

If he wanted to aggrandise it, I don’t think he succeeded:-

And not to forget the wonderful crinkle-crankle walls:-

I am posting a very good, long obituary by Christopher Knight which has just been published in the Los Angeles Times.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2024-07-13/bill-viola-dead-video-artist

I am extremely sorry to read of the death of Bill Viola (https://mailchi.mp/southernandpartners/remembering-bill-viola-1951-2024?e=67a409c7c3).

I have never forgotten the impact of first seeing his work in Durham Cathedral. We were driving south and stopped in Durham, where The Messenger was displayed in the nave.

In autumn 2003, he did an exhibition at the National Gallery called The Passions, which had first been shown by John Walsh at the Getty. It was the first time that there had been a monographic exhibition by a living artist and worked very well in the basement galleries of the Sainsbury Wing – a small number of works filling the space in a way which was profound.

More recently, on 9 February 2017, I visited him and his wife, Kira Perov, at their studio in Los Angeles. As we left, I took a photograph of him. I don’t normally do this, but I think I knew that it was probably the last time I would see him.

I am re-posting it in his memory:-

We went last night to Katya Kabanova at Grange Park Opera, a brilliant production directed by David Alden.  It didn’t seem quite as far as I thought and the theatre – the theatre in the woods – now feels so much more established in its setting in the woods behind West Horsley Place.  It’s a credit to Wasfi Kani and to the remarkable craft skills of its builder Martin Smith of R.J. Smith & Co, who built it at such speed in 2017, a version of La Scala in Surrey:-

We went to an intriguing intervention by Langlands & Bell on the ground floor of an architectural practice called Apt at the northern, Finsbury end of St. John Street.  I thought how nice it was to see works of art in what was essentially a work environment, but in the talk, it was pointed out how many museums are in unconventional environments, including several that Langlands & Bell have worked in – the Soane, Charleston.

One of their first works, preserved as the seat of a chair in the exhibition, was a model of the basement of the National Gallery for the Property Services Agency which maybe gave them a taste for the more surreal histories of museums (or muse ums).

I have been asked to supply an installation shot of the Treehandles.  I did so, but have been puzzling over the optical illusion which it took me a while to work out:-

It has also made me realise, which I already knew, how beautiful the placement of every object was:-