WONDER OF OUR STAGE

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees ...

William Blake, Songs of Experience

Last week was the first annual, national Shakespeare Week. In celebration, I offer two new sonnets, written as a tribute from an actor to the one whom Ben Jonson called ‘the wonder of our stage’:

In progress
A new self-portrait, my second in oils, smaller and rather different in style from the one featured in our last film, Reflections.

News

My Perfect Mind returns to the Young Vic for a limited season 1st September. Booking is now open on the theatre’s website.

LENTEN REFLECTION

This, as a coherent whole, only casually observed;
never as yet tried in suffering or succeeding,
held together for an enduring fulfillment,
yet so as if for times to come, out of these scattered things,
something serious and lasting were being planned.

Rilke, ‘Self-Portrait’ (1906)

A new film and a new sonnet:

Here is neither a self-portrait nor a domestic interior but an urban landscape, the latest version of my painting of Mill Lane previewed in our Sensing Spaces film. 

I was walking down Mill Lane yesterday and on the pavement outside our local florist was greeted by these charming flowers which some children had painted in colour chalk. 

Photo by EP

The flowers reminded me that Mill Lane, a name redolent of the old rural hamlet of West End, still has vestiges and echoes of its meadowed past amidst its terraces, shops and modest high-rises – as celebrated in this little film.

SENSING SPACES

After a short hiatus, a bumper film blog complete with special effects:

FOR ALL STUDIOUS AND CURIOUS PERSONS

If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?

Virginia Woolf, A Room  of One’s Own 

When the British Museum first opened its doors to the public on 15 January 1759, it was housed in a seventeenth-century mansion, Montague House, in Bloomsbury on the site of today’s building. Entry was free and given to ‘all studious and curious persons’.

Today, 255 years later, I was one of the very last visitors to leave at closing time. I offer here a pithy reflection to mark this particular milestone in the Museum’s history.

The original proposed ticket for admission to view the Museum’s
collection, located in the Trustees Original Papers of 1757.

Postscript

Don’t miss Part Two of ‘To Make a Beginning’, published earlier today.

TO MAKE A BEGINNING, PART TWO

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island 

There is something of the Michelangelo in this man.

Balzac on Daumier 

A new short film is imminent, to mark the 255th anniversary of the British Museum which opened to the public on 15 January 1759. Stay tuned!

British Museum Great Court. Photo by EP

TO MAKE A BEGINNING

In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.

Thomas Carlyle 

Part One of a New Year’s reflection:

Part Two coming soon …

A very happy New Year to you all!

New Year’s rose. Photo by EP

WINTER EPIPHANIES

Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany.

James Joyce, Stephen Hero 

Merry Christmas!