Open "Doors"

The launch party for Cheltenham Green Doors took place at the Gardens Gallery last evening. Our local MP made a good speech: the chain gang were amongst the nobs present. Then off we biked for the first Film Society offering, an Indian film, "The Lunchbox". Not many green doors programmes in India I guess.

Photographers

Two of them have been showing work at the Gardens Gallery here all for a week. I went along to admire their work on Friday night, by when there was already a healthy rash of red dots scattered amongst the exhibits.

Gardens Gallery

Kate Dove, Fran Browne, Robert Goldsmith, Toby Moate and Freda Dusnic have put together an exhibition at the Gardens Gallery, which formally opened this evening. They only had a fortnight to prepare, but it all looks very professional. I particularly liked our neighbour, Freddie's photographs: she posed (a selfless perhaps?) in front of one.

Freeman of Cheltenham

Bob Freeman's funeral takes place today. Family and friends will meet afterwards at the Gardens Gallery, Montpellier, which Bob did much to help establish and support. Only last October, when few would have known how unwell he was, he exhibited this portrait of Stephen Isserlis there.

Besides his own artistic work, Bob produced a regular monthly round up of exhibitions and events: a large number of those on his mailing list will have shared my sadness at hearing - before Christmas - that he had become too ill to continue this encouraging and enlivening endeavour.

RIP.

Art eclectic

Chris James teaches at Cirencester College. Somehow, he also finds time to paint and sculpt: I met him at the Gardens Gallery yesterday, where he has an exhibition. I liked this colourful take on the Ruskin Mill lake, inspiration for a number of the works in what is a cheerful show. It is more three-dimensional than it looks - a virtual collage.

Chris moaned a little about the scaffolding surrounding the Gallery, which - he surmised - accounted for the small number of visits. Not the problem experienced by The Wilson, so we read in the paper: crowds have flooded in to see round since the reopening three weeks ago. I sat next to the Friends' Chair, Gina Wilson (no relation) last night, who enthused about the transformation.

On my other side was Barbara McNaught, whose art is non-visual: she has just published her second collection of poems, Strings of Pearls.

The art of comedy has also been on public display of late, though Jeremy Paxman's Newsnight interview (viral on YouTube) with Russell Brand was not entirely humorous. Indeed there was a deadly seriousness about Brand's sermon on revolution.

Far indeed from Pacem in Terris, Pope John XXIII's encyclical, published 50 years ago this year. "His is not a message of revolution," writes Bruce Kent in this week's Tablet. "We exhort our sons to take an active part in public life," wrote that good Pope. Brand, on the other hand, says he has never voted, and has no intention of doing so.

What credit will it reflect on the New Statesman for allowing him in as guest editor I wonder? It's paradoxical that someone so intelligent should wish to be so destructive - of our society. After all, "you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them." I thought Paxman was excellent.

Thomas (b. 1979, so four years Brand's junior) says that he "does seem to be able to articulate a lot of what the youth feel about modern Britain - in that there’s no point being involved in the process. The problem is that he doesn’t present an alternative. There is no alternative. So what next?"

As I see it, the RBs of this world wield immense power through their super ability to articulate. So, when their message is a despairing one, it tends to remove hope from you and me. We can only do right what we can, in the relationships we have. No? Some of the most right will be works of art.

More Festival-going

Caroline is rightly indignant with the Cheltenham Festivals continuing to sideline the Gardens' Gallery in Montpellier. Not only do they omit any mention of the Gallery in their brochure, it doesn't even feature on the festival maps, or on the signposts. And the massed bank of festival loos is plonked just next to it, reducing it to worse than Cinderella status. (Postscript: A Festival-goer caught short, spent her penny, and then - noticing the Gallery - went in and spent a further £300.)

Until a month ago, Pascal Lamy headed the World Trade Organization: yesterday afternoon he came to Cheltenham to discuss his forthcoming memoir, "The Geneva Consensus". The Times' Philip Collins kept the discussion nice and general, though without much sympathy for where Lamy was coming from, Collins appearing both less internationalist and more Conservative.

The memoir's title was chosen to juxtapose the author's standpoint with the Washington Consensus, which has come to stand for "Liberalise and God will take care of the rest." Lamy's approach is rather to take care of how trade works - in order for trade to work at all.

He praised Gordon Brown - prescient about the need for global governance - but China's "Don't ask me to do what you haven't done!"sums up the impasse, for instance in reaching a worldwide consensus on carbon reduction. We can't, Lamy maintains, halt globalisation, because technology is its engine - and technology has no reverse gear. It brings people closer to one another, but they still have different cultures. (The Inuits have always killed seals, but Europe expresses its disgust by banning Canadian imports.) Globalisation has formidably shrunk the numbers of the planet's poor, but at the expense of greater inequality.

A stimulating hour! As was my evening session - a genial chat between Mark Lawson and Jonathan Miller. Again, the interviewer gave his subject plenty of rope: with this, he readily reprised the role of enfant terrible, by which he first came to fame. There were a few repetitions, and one or two names escaped him, but otherwise it was hard to think that this was a man in his 80th year.

Until afterwards, that is: beginning my bike ride home, I saw someone in the shadows outside the Writers' Room, puffing at a cigarette. The enfant terrible had morphed into the Picture of Dorian Gray. I turned the bike round, and asked if I could take a photograph. (Nothing ventured...) "I hate being photographed," came the response, but he was willing to chat. "I'm not a Jew, just jewish," I quoted from Beyond the fringe. Was he a believer in the divine? "Certainly not," he said, "and what's more if Jesus came back I would ensure he was brought before the International Criminal Court."

This morning, by contrast, I escaped to Tetbury again, and heard - inter alia - the sublime Sarah Connolly singing Schumann and Duparc. These repeated words of Baudelaire, set by the latter, sum up Tetbury in contrast to grungy, pragmatic, busy, eclectic Cheltenham: "Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté."

Used condoms form the detritus after Glastonbury: discarded Times cotton shopping bags after Cheltenham, and statins after Tetbury.

Another weekend, another festival

Montpellier Gardens is full of tents once more, this weekend for the Food & Drink Festival. We biked down  in the sunshine this evening, calling first at the Gardens Gallery. It's fun looking round, even though we didn't plan - as others clearly had done - to have supper there. You could spend a fortune if you wanted. Food porn?

Open West prizewinners

The Gardens Gallery hosts works by the three prizewinners at Open West's March 2012 exhibition this week: tonight there were free drinks for the nobs, but thankfully no speeches. It was a very black and white affair, dominated by the work of two Japanese artists: Koji Shiraya's porcelain spheres must have looked very different in the Gloucester Cathedral Crypt (I couldn't get down there on the day I visited).

On the other hand, the charming but alarming all-black assemblage of model dodos etc. created by Haruka Miyamoto stood out against the white Gallery walls - in contrast to their rather hideaway positioning in the Cathedral's alcoves: extinction portrayed through means of materials given a second life, a parable to give hope to the threatened human species. Brilliant work! And a great bit of sponsorship by Dale Vince's Ecotricity.

Words & Pictures

"Words & Pictures: the Art of Illustration" is the title of the new exhibition at the Gardens Gallery, which I visited yesterday afternoon. The layout of the Literature Festival's Montpellier campus seems rather more friendly to this useful gallery this year. Something that's borne out in visitor numbers, I gather - and I hope sales too.

For Niki Whitfield has assembled a most colourful collection of exhibits: four quite different - but all vibrant - takes on the art of illustration, in the form of cards, books, framed/mounted prints and water colours. And as with all Niki's shows, it's immaculately curated. You can catch it till Tuesday evening next.

Having viewed the pictures, I went on to listen to the words - in this instance of Anglican priest, Lucy Winkett. Not that she was advocating too many of them: "the power of silence," was her theme, and indeed she "led us into" silence very effectively at the end of her hour. "Imagine," she urged us, "that you are sitting on a lovely river bank, and placing all the noises you hear into an endless procession of little boats, which float off downstream."

This was a beautifully reflective talk from someone who's surely made to be one of the first women bishops. But how did she she manage to suppress any mention of the word "prayer"? And a friend pointed out afterwards two other omissions: the silence from which a perhaps-depressed person has to be helped to escape; and the value of the mantra as a means of sustaining an individual's period of silence. But then an hour was too short.

Gardens Gallery revisited

Millie Joines, Carole Bury and John Bromley's exhibition at the Montpellier Gardens Gallery is one of the brightest I've been to in a while. First impressions are important, and Millie has had the excellent idea of installing two of her pots outside, with plants in them - that's after all for what they're intended. There's more colour within, not only from the fresh flowers, but also from Carole's luminous landscapes. Some of John's plant prints look a little cold and Wintry by comparison, but they are beautifully presented. All three artists, seasoned exhibitors at this Gallery, were there yesterday when I dropped by.

And they passed on one bit of good news: Mini had reported one of the Gallery's A-boards as missing on Tuesday - they are rather expensive. It now turns out that someone had kindly posted it up a tree, from which John has now retrieved it.

Wilsons 2

In the late '80s, we stayed a number of times at Brandsby Hall when visiting Edmund at Ampleforth: a friend had bought it from the Fairfax-Cholmeley family, owners since the 16th Century. It's a large, square, mid-18th Century house in dark stone sitting just up from the plain of York, with gardens to match the grandeur of the house.

I popped into Cheltenham's Gardens Gallery yesterday morning, where Robin Wilson (here photographed) and Rosie Fairfax-Cholmeley - daughter of the man who sold Brandsby to our friend - are at present exhibiting linocuts (mainly). It was good to see the Gallery with its doors fully folded back, resembling more the stage set that the building was originally.

Inside, I particularly liked Rosie's animals, but both artists nicely evoke a rather period sort of English spirit. Together with its display of their books and cards, the show looks great - one of the better ones I've visited in this gallery. (Their website is interesting too.)

Also looking was Sophia Wilson, Exhibitions & Education Manager at Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum - with time for visits, her base still being closed for work on the new extension: she reports they're proceeding well.

Gardens Gallery Quinquennial

Caroline's been involved in the Cheltenham Montpellier Gardens Gallery since its inception. This explains my presence there this evening for the second time in a week, for the party to mark its fifth birthday, as it were. The great and the good were present: not just our new Mayor, photographed here with Mini, but sundry other illuminati/ae, including our MP. (I forbore from berating him again for his support for the idea of gay marriage, as I had done when last we met in the Gallery.) Speeches were spoken about the blessings the Gallery has brought for the artistic life of the town, and fizzy wine flowed, while the wind howled outside. And the best news of all: my picture has been sold!

Cheltenham's Summer Exhibition

It's hardly on the Burlington House scale, but our very own Montpellier Gardens Gallery currently has its first Summer Exhibition: it opened tonight - here (in my snap) is Catherine Stuart, the organiser, being bunched. And the really exciting news for me is that at last I have a photograph up in the gallery - my debut appearance there as a selling artist. You can just see it - the portrait-style window fourth from the right on the far wall. I chose this one as it looks (to me) quite painterly, and I knew there wouldn't be many photographers exhibiting. There are two or three red stickers already - not on mine though. Ah well. It was an enjoyable party anyway.

Rupert Aker

For this next seven days, our Gardens Gallery, Montpellier has a one-man show on: I called in this afternoon, between the showers.

Rupert Aker works for the Soil Association: that charity is lucky to have on the staff someone who can record so vividly (and beautifully) the variety of landscapes within which its members operate. An illustrated book is available to purchase, as well as Rupert's pictures: some are Cheltenham scenes, but for the most part they are very attractive Gloucestershire/Oxfordshire landscapes, a few quite abstract. All in all, a credit to the Gallery.

"Exploring solitude"

This is the title of an unusual exhibition at our Gardens Gallery. It "opened" this evening. Neville Gable travelled to the Antarctic a year or two ago on an artistic commission under the auspices of the British Antarctic Survey. There, he produced videos featuring himself, photographed by cameras (one launched on a kite); and he wrote daily emails to his wife, Joan, who used the text to produce a series of imaginative drawings. A book in a very limited edition has resulted - it was on display, alongside the last letter of Cheltonian Edward Wilson, who was part of Scott's last - ill-fated - expedition. Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum are promoting this show, and have acquired the videos to go with their collection of Wilson memorabilia.

Seeing our MP, Martin Horwood, amongst others present at the opening, I bent his ear with my view of the government's Alice in Wonderland approach to the definition of "marriage": he said I was the first person in his constituency who had told him of their opposition to the proposal that gays should be able to "marry"; which amazed me. "All that's necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," didn't someone say?

Transition Festival

Today, a week-long Transition Town Cheltenham residency began at our local Gardens Gallery. The different action groups each had a display.

This morning, I took along various photographs for the Heart & Soul board: we went back this evening, for the opening party, and admired all the work that had been put in to enliven the building. We learnt that 80 people had been through the Gallery during the first day. The question is, for how many of them was "transition" a new concept?

Heart & Soul have an open space session as part of the Festival from 5 to 6.30pm next Sunday 27th November - "Faith in Transition: what do faith communities have to offer?" At a time when one or two church leaders are questioning the science upon which Transition is founded, it seems to me more than ever important that Christians should witness - alongside other people of faith - to what their belief in creation implies.

Cheltenham Festival of Literature

The Festival - it starts today - has taken a giant leap forward: not only Imperial Gardens, but Montpellier Gardens too has this year become a tented city for the duration. Indeed, the construction process began weeks ago, causing noise and traffic sufficient to upset everyone within a wide radius no doubt. Pity those who have hired the Gardens Gallery during those weeks! Indeed, the Gallery isn't even marked on the Festival map!

My lack of sympathy for the scale of this hyper-festival has been made plain in previous years: expansion into Montpellier runs parallel with withdrawal from the Everyman Theatre and the Parabola Arts Centre. What will hostelries and shops near those two sites make of the non-passing trade? This morning, I toured the campuses on my bike: the only people I saw around were yellow-coated security guards and minions from sponsors such as The Times and Sky. Coming away, I saw an elderly gentleman emerge from a car and fiddle with his pipe: Tony Benn it was, taller than I expected. (Though he didn't refuse to have his photograph taken, he seemed a little taken aback with the speed at which I produced my camera.)

4Seen

This is the title of an exhibition currently showing at The Gardens Gallery, here in Cheltenham. Four award winners at the Open West show earlier this year are exhibiting work accomplished since then, the most interesting to me being Ellen Nolan’s photographic project, Safety in Numbers. This she calls "an observation on the dynamics and identities of a group of Cheltenham school children within the context of a modern school." It was developed as a result of a short but intensive collaboration with Cheltenham Bournside School and Sixth Form Centre.

Here is Ellen at the exhibition's opening - Caroline and I biked down there this evening - talking with some of the students who posed for her impressive photographs. It was good to attend a Private View where the average ago of those present was about half my own.

Birds of passage

Nicki Gwynn-Jones ARPS has a new exhibition of her photographs in Cheltenham: it opened this evening, "A bird's eye view". Her stunning ornithological treatments are shot in Florida, whither she commutes along with her husband. ("How long, O Lord?" It's all very well dedicating your show to those rescuing sea birds on the Gulf of Mexico's shores, but don't airoplanes run on... oil?)

Nicki is sharing the Gardens Gallery this week with Helen Dewbery LRPS, whose photography is less spectacular, but in a way more coherent. Both shows are worth a visit, I'd say. Especially on an evening like tonight, when the Montpellier Gardens are to be seen at their most vibrant. What a joy it is to live in Cheltenham!

Rory

Caroline, Agnes (and Ida) and I all went to see Rory Morrell's exhibition yesterday, at the Cheltenham School of Drawing and Painting, which he runs. It was a large show, filling three studios. There was a great variety of charcoal life drawings, all beautifully wrought. There's even one of Agnes, who has sat as a model for the Cheltenham School in the past.

But we also very much liked the oil landscapes of scenes near The Lizard and in Portugal. I fear not enough people knew about this excellent exhibition: there weren't that many red dots. This bit of publicity is too late, as the show closed yesterday evening.

Rory also showed me a folder of photographs he has taken: some of them are worthy of exhibition in their own right. As always, he was overly modest about them.

A quarter of a mile away, in the Gardens Gallery, Pam Stone has a solo show, contrasting but also worth seeing: some quite impressive portraits in a variety of media. That's on till next Tuesday evening, 26th August.

In London, Birmingham or Bristol, either of these shows would be getting quite a lot of attention: as Caroline always says - there's never much of a buzz created by anything here in Cheltenham.