Mark Bradford

We made it at last today to the Mark Bradford exhibition in San Francisco at SFMOMA – [Link] Exhibition website – [Link] Maybe it’s about … tracing the ghosts of cities past. It’s the pulling off of a layer and finding another underneath. It’s the … details that point to people saying, “We exist; we…

ornament – overlooked and revisited

I have just received a copy of Diana Newall and Christina Unwin’s marvelous book The Chronology of Pattern [Link] – just published in the UK by Bloomsbury/A & C Black. We still radically separate ornament from style and meaning, treating it as superfluous and superficial, yet it is the primary experience we have of much…

spectral stone

The Coquet Valley in Northumberland is fascinating me. [Link] Around Lordenshaws, across from the market town of Rothbury, are many carved rock surfaces, typically associated with farming communities from the fourth to and millennia BCE, maybe earlier and maybe later. Birky Hill I met Stan Beckensall, school teacher in Rothbury, rock art enthusiast, some thirty…