Back again!

Michael and I have been living in the south of France since the covid outbreak. We bought a little holiday house a few years ago and then recently added a studio to the nest so we could work when we came here. We love it here. We love it with the same concerted passion we

Sculpture Symposium in Bagni di Lucca

Every day since the first of July you wander over the passerella to the Villa Fiori gardens and you hear the musical tapping of metal on stone.  The sculpture symposium, one of the many wonderful events of the Bagni di Lucca Art Festival, has seen the works of five sculptors evolving and ‘becoming’ over the

Creating an Art Festival in Bagni di Lucca

On a late summer’s day last year, under a pergola dripping in wisteria and overlooking splendid vistas, a thought was born to a philanthropist and his friends, to have an art festival in Ponte a Serraglio.  For years we had all been coming here, and every year another one or two shops would close down. 

Carving Marble in Pietrasanta

Sollai, our youngest son, arrived in Bagni di Lucca just before Christmas last year after a year in Montreal with his acrobat girlfriend, Danica.  He had spent the year working on log cabins, stone chimneys and gardens up around the lakes and creating his sculpture carving alabaster and marble, in his city studio.  Even though

Bagni di Lucca’s Art Festival

Originally posted on Bella Bagni di Lucca:
Bagni di Lucca is set to host a brand new Art Festival this summer. In the sunny months of July, August and September Ponte a Seraglio will be filled with performance artists, painters, sculptors and photographers. Meet part of the organizing team. From the left…Jaqueline, Ira, our Sindaco…

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

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

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