Bristol

I've now been living in Bristol for almost 2 years and I fall in love with the City a little more each day. It's vibrant, quirky, fun and generally just a great place to live. Every weekend there's something new to do and one of the highlights of the year is Bristol Harbour Festival, a weekend of music, performances and art, based around the harbourside. The weekend happens in July, and this year we were lucky with gorgeous weather, which gave me the opportunity to take some photos of Bristol, the crowds and the atmosphere. As the weather gets colder, darker and wetter I thought I would share this belated post now, to bring some fun and sunshine in to the short winter days! I hope you like them!

Art on the Hill

Tomorrow I am taking part in Art on the Hill, the Windmill Hill and Victoria Park Arts Trail. It's a great weekend showcasing local talent and a good excuse to have a nose around people's houses. So do come along, you'll find me at venue no. 43 - I'm also selling cakes so if you don't like the photography, you may like a cake instead!

Italia

A couple of weeks ago I went to Italy for the first time. We flew into Rome, spent a couple of days doing the usual tourist attractions such as the Coliseum, the Forum, Vatican city, catacombs, eating pizza and gelato - you know the usual - from there we took a train to Anzio and picked up Gertrude, our mobile home for the next 10 days.

(Beautiful isn't she!)

So armed with 3 rolls of black and white film and my trusty canon camera we hit the coast and drove South, stopping at; Naples, Pompeii, Sorrento (for a wedding, complete with 10 course appetisers, 5 course sit down meal and cake and dessert to follow), then off to the Amalfi Coast and back up to Rome to drop the van off and head back to England. The vaction was full of pizza, pasta, gelato, sea, sun, mosquito bites, ruins, mad Italian drivers, and I loved every mintue of it. Below are a few of my favourite photos from the trip which I hope capture the various parts of Italy I saw. A vibrant country full of run down towns, ornate rich towns, beautiful ruins, delicious food and a stunning coastline - Italy, I will definitely be back!

A Very Belated Blog Post

I was toying with the idea just the other day to start a completely new blog, but then I thought why? Just to end up neglecting it like I have this one?! I've loved posting on this blog and it features some of my own work from the past as well as those who have inspired me, so I am going to persevere and continue to add to it.
As you may recall, last year I moved to Bristol and I'm happy to announce that I'm still here, although I have moved twice since I last posted. I've read many more books (currently on number 21, [If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino, in case you were interested] of 2015) and seen many more fantastic exhibitions since my last post about David Bailey. In fact, a couple of weekends ago I managed to get up to London to see Barbara Hepworth's awe inspiring sculptures at the Tate Britain (on until 25th October).

Another exhibition I would encourage people to see is Richard Long's at the Arnolfini in Bristol, an artist I was aware of but had never seen exhibited before. His sculptures, walking documentations and photographs of past location sculptures are almost ethereal, otherworldly, reminding me very much of ancient mystical sites, such as Stonehenge.

It's been a busy year, I've travelled to Paris for the usual Paris Photo festival, St Anton for the annual Organ ski holiday and Berlin, and will soon be off to Italy. I haven't stopped taking my own photographs, returning to black and white film, street photography that I've loved doing in the past. In fact, on the 3rd and 4th October I will be opening my house to showcase past and present work for Art on the Hill, which I am both nervous and excited about, what with it being my first exhibition since Uni. So if you are around the Windmill Hill/Victoria Park area do drop in - I'm bribing the public with cake anyway!

So with that, I PROMISE to post again and give you an update on my own work as well as with what's been inspiring me.

David Bailey's Stardust

At the weekend, I went home to London to see family and friends, but more importantly to see David Bailey's exhibition Stardust at the National Portrait Gallery. David Bailey has always been one of my favourite photographers, in fact I think it's safe to say that it was his work that first got me into photography - as Bailey himself once said, 'It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary'. So it is safe to say that my expectations were high, and I'm thrilled to report the exhibition did not disappoint. I absolutely loved the diverse range of his work and the exhibition really illustrated the extraordinary range of subjects that Bailey has captured: actors, writers, musicians, filmmakers, designers, models, artists and people encountered on his travels; many of them famous, some anonymous, all of them perfectly captured. That's the thing I love about him, he really manages to capture the individual, no matter who they are or where they're from you are shown a sense of their personality.

It is extremely rare that a leading institution allows an artist to curate his or her own retrospective, however I am so glad that they did. Featuring over 250 images, personally selected and printed by Bailey, the exhibition offers an unmissable opportunity to experience the work of one of the world’s greatest image-makers. He also designed the book (a must purchase of mine of course!) in fact Sandy Nairne, the gallery's Director, admitted that giving the artist such free rein was unusual; "We had to relax. It became very clear that he did have a vision about this show. This is Bailey through and through." But by giving Bailey free reign, we got to see all sides of his work, not just the famous shots of models and rock stars. In fact one whole room was dedicated to his wife Catherine Bailey, and featured many intensely personal shots of her and their children. As a huge fan of his work, I was wonderfully surprised at how few images in the exhibition I had actually seen before!

So, just in case you haven't got the hint, I loved the show and could not recommend it enough - I'm definitely going back whenever I'm next in London! To give you a little taste of what's on show, here's an extremely small selection of my favourites.

Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

G. K. Chesterson

Cakes

Over the past year I have made several of my world famous (allow me this exaggeration) signature cakes. I have decorated a gardening themed cake for a family friends 60th, a fishing one for my Uncles 50th and then of course there's Christmas. This year, however, instead of one big Christmas cake, I decided to make several individual sized ones - just to make the process even more laborious.
Below are the results of the many hours spent moulding, colouring and cursing icing. Hope you like them!

Now I realise the next photo isn't technically a cake, however I am still pretty damn pleased (and therefore keen to show off) with my shortbread Christmas Tree. (Much tastier than horrid fruit cake too (not that my fruit cake tastes horrid, I just don't like fruit cake)!)