A Walk in the Snow in Bagni di Lucca

Scrinch scrunching in the snow.  The world silent and soft, surrounded in a white haze, gentle flakes caressing your face and freezing your hair.  That day of snow falling endlessly was so beautiful.  We walked up to Bagni Caldi delighting in the mysterious panoramas surrounding us, and down to Ponte a Serraglio, more beautiful than

Winter in Tuscany

We love winter in Tuscany.  We arrived home in early December with snow flakes falling.  A frosty white world greeted us in Pieve dei Monti di Villa and we were no sooner there than we were walking up the cobbled street paths of the next little village upwards, Monti di Villa, to see a Presepe

Flying on Dreams

Here we are in Hong Kong again.  We are up on the fourth floor in our little space in Hollywood Rd with the sounds of buses roaring by and children squealing in the gardens below, water always drip drip dripping from some overflowing pipe in the courtyard. A quiet moment actually, to reflect, as there

Guardians Unveiled at Warrnambool Regional Gallery

My ears are aching from the wild ocean wind.  The cobalt sea is peaking in ragged white out beyond the break water.  We are in Warrnambool, a country town in the south of Victoria, in Australia.  Warrnambool is not far from the twelve apostles, the stony giant monoliths cut off from the mainland by the

‘eclectic’ Michael Cartwright’s exhibition at La Rondine Gallery

Blood red, dripping, over the canvas, through the net, into the royal blue black sea.  The boat incandescent against a golden, almost a dirty gold, luminous light.  ‘The Catch’, huge and slaughtered, in the depths of the sea.  The colours are exquisitely beautiful and the subject poignantly ‘triste’, sad.  It’s an amazing painting in its

A land of art, milk and dripping honey

I am lying on the sand in a little cove just below Livorno.  The water is gently lapping nearby and a child plucks delightedly at each gush of wave.  The sun is warm and low in the sky and the big gulls swoop and swarm over a dark patch in the water.  I feel deeply

Jacob Cartwright, Guy Dowsett and Henna Kaikula performing ‘Reflections’ at La Rondine Gallery

Piano and clarinet burring insistently, drops of sweet notes like water tinkling in a bowl, a little bit sad, reflective, pensive.  Her body rises and falls like a pendulum, seductive with the same graceful fluidity of a cat, her contortions elevated to a beautiful dance, a body without boundaries.  The performance of music and contortion

Jacob Cartwright, ‘Reflection’, a photography exhibition at La Rondine Gallery, Bagni di Lucca

Water.  Reflections of strength and beauty, transparent layering of leaves and stone, transposed by light immersing itself in the thousand crystals of marble and lying in wait in the luminous pond below.  A feeling of quiet meditation in the whole exhibition. Jacob Cartwright has drawn inspiration for this series of photographs from his excursions walking

La Rondine – a new gallery in Ponte a Serraglio

Swooping through the air, their forked tails and pointed wings in silhouette against brilliant blue skies, they arrive in spring and leave in autumn, busy all summer long, tending their babies and devouring the myriad of insects floating over the fields and waterways, chirping socially through the balmy twilight evenings on top of their nests

Festa di Sant’ Anna, in the mountains of Bagni di Lucca

Puttering up the winding mountain road today on the vespa, we stopped at breathtaking vistas from the top of Monti di Villa overlooking the valley between the Appenines and the great craggy mounts of the Apuans.  We were in those craggy mountains yesterday on our way to Carrara to partake in a cultural evening with