advance reading copies arrived today from random house us.
the real me
suzanne dean at random house has designed a very beautiful cover for the red house. look carefully at the figures in the willow pattern...
the first proper winter temperatures. and the first swim in the thames in properly cold water. though i do very little swimming per se. more energetic floating. it seems safer in the winter not to head off upriver midstream. fantastic, though. it makes me joyous every time (i wonder sometimes if there might be a dash of walrus dna in there somewhere; one of my forebears geting a little too lonely during those 23 hr nights way back). the river feels like mine again...
toby moorcroft and i saw this from the top of twmpa / lord hereford's knob while taking a hearty walk during the crunch festival. it is, apparently, a (solar) glory surrounding a brocken spectre. perhaps you already knew that...
the other night i watched the cave of forgotten dreams, werner herzog's documentary about the chauvet caves in the limestone cliffs above the ardeche river in france, which were discovered in 1994 and which contain the oldest known cave paintings in the world, 30 - 26,000 bce. rhinoceroses, cave lions, horses, panthers, bears, the stencilled outline of an artist's right hand, repeated throughout the cave, the same man identifiable by the crooked little finger of his right hand.
i had a couple of hours spare in london yesterday so i visited the national portrait gallery, which i do every so often, though because i've been painting portraits recently everything was much more interesting this time and i was standing a lot closer...
really reassuring to see a bad lucian freud (albeit opposite a breath-takingly good self-portrait of his): lord jacob rothschild, the face grey and lifeless, the background sloppy. it looked likes a unwilling commission done at speed.
Pages
