Author: penwithlit

On a hot day, in need of healing, I re-discovered this herb garden. It is hidden away the other side of a gate off St John’s Square in Clerkenwell. The gate is open and you can walk right in. There are benches, and aromatic plants. At the back, there’s.a cloister.

I went in the cloister, and found the ideal place to sketch: cool, still, and quiet, with a view from those windows.

Here’s the view:

The Order of St John has a long history.

By 1080, a hospital had been established in Jerusalem by a group of monks under the guidance of Brother Gerard. Its purpose was to care for the many pilgrims who had become ill on their travels to the Holy Land. The men and women who worked there were members of…

Here is the University of Oxford Nuclear Physics building, seen from the Banbury Road.

The building was renamed the “Denys Wilkinson Building” in 2002. It was built in 1967 to the designs of architect Philip Dowson of Arup. The fan-shaped structure originally housed a Van der Graff particle accelerator, now dismantled. [https://manchesterhistory.net/architecture/1960/denyswilkinson.html]

Professor Wilkinson (1922-2016) was the Head of the Nuclear Physics Department from 1962-1976.

The building on the left is the “Thom Building” which houses the Engineering Department. This building had a marvellous “paternoster” lift in the 1970s. (Note 1). This is a lift with single compartments, which operates in a continuous loop, like rosary beads, hence the name. You simply stepped into one of the slowly moving compartments and were carried up or down.

Here is work…

“Synchrony in Green is a composition characterised by a limited colour range. The simplification of planes reinforces the sober and expressive nature of this still life, and these values are in turn heightened by the geometric shapes of the elements portrayed. Set in an undefined interior, in the foreground we perceive a jug and three lemons on the table covered with a green tablecloth and, on a second plane, a larger vase containing a eucalyptus branch, to the right of which we see the back of a chair. In addition to its Cézannesque references, this canvas presents decorative and intimate values and is a work characterised by chromatic harmony.

Sérusier was a distinguished painter, professor and theoretician. In the town of Pont-Aven in Brittany he became a close friend of Gauguin’s, disseminating the latter’s…

There is no why to suffering, only a how.

How did it affect you? How did it change your outlook, your character, your purpose? What did it do your plans and your incentive to go on? Did it tarnish your spirit? Psychotherapy, in its attempt to address one’s personal distress, often works with the victim to move away from asking the proverbial question of trauma. And many seek treatment because they know they ought to cease asking it, but can’t.

Acknowledging the near complete uncertainty of one’s life entails relinquishing the delusion of control, the belief that he can predict and control the various calamities waiting behind the door of possibility. In his understanding, much of his suffering is personal, engendered by those who wish to harm him and a cruel universe having him atop its hit-list. So, if he does find himself sitting in an inconsequential room with an…

In the first of these two articles looking at what our ancestors wore on the beach, I had reached 1890 with just a glimpse of lower leg and arm from the wild young things as they paraded themselves in the sun. Otherwise, adults only bared the absolute minimum, most even wearing hats. The only members of the family who could, in the right place, get away with anything less were children, and even they were often well covered up.

William Merritt Chase, A Sunny Day at Shinnecock Bay (1892), oil on canvas, 46.99 x 60.33 cm, Private collection. WikiArt.

The citizens of New York often went to the beaches of Long Island, NY, although here William Merritt Chase has travelled far from the crowds, out among the Hamptons, where the more affluent were building their holiday mansions. Chase was a key figure in American art in the late nineteenth century:…