JAMES KELSO
  • Home
  • About JK
  • Gallery 1
    • Dune
    • The Winter's Tale
    • The Raft
    • Vespers
    • Dupuytrens
    • Farewell to Stockevik
    • Gallery 2
    • Gran Via
    • Carriers
    • Isolation
    • La Malvinie
    • 16 Walpole
    • The Ghost Tanker
    • The Shipping Forecast
    • The Didcot Interpretation
    • Site
    • Lake Keitele
    • Tom Stoppard
    • The Maybe Man
    • Double Self Portrait With Knees
    • Post Ironic Iron Horse
    • Terminus
    • Cleared to Land
    • Matins
    • The Worm Forgives the Plough
    • Isolation
    • Red Spotty
    • Landed
  • Prints
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Landed
  • Et Cetera

Watlington Artweeks, 2021

19/6/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
​Congratulations to Watlington Artweeks for a fabulous 2021 event. How lucky the town is to have such a festival of art. The sheer amount of effort and organisation is remarkable. The skill and craft levels of the art are exceptional; there was imagination and decorative ideas wherever you looked. A starry, starry portrait in the High Street was perhaps a high point for me. The event took place throughout the town. St Leonard’s parish church was one focus. Was there anything missing? Well, we live in eventful times. I did miss a sense of enquiry and comment. I look at local children being shown round, many of whom will be priced out of living here when they grow up. I thought of various concerns: the town’s thundering lorry traffic, that rattles everyone’s back teeth. The destruction of the green belt. The 1% pay raise for nurses. The potholes, down which several artists are still missing. The rural over-development. 3000 new homes on the Oxford plain. The ‘concrete councillors’ getting their way. The pandemic. Ye olde brexit, that is now so ‘done’ it no longer warrants a capital letter. The vaccine delivery triumph. Is this - are these - not the stuff of art, as well as vases of petunias? Where is the unease for our current plight? Adjacent to the church, on the nearby green, the ride-on mower scythes through the buttercups, skin-heading the grass to within an inch of its life. If gentle wildflowers can’t flourish by a churchyard, what does that say about us?  For the Artweeks Team then, a spectacular success. For 2022, more of the same, please. And, from the artists, even more effort with perhaps with some added muscularity.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    James Kelso

    Author, author, I hear you cry. Well, here goes. I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally… Hang on that’s not me, that’s Tennyson. Oops! Wrong copy, sorree. I’m James Kelso – and, actually, do you know what, I feel a tad awkward writing this sort of self-puffery. So, if it’s okay with you, can we leave it there? Thank you. I knew you’d understand. Browse on, McDuff.

    Archives

    September 2021
    August 2021
    June 2021
    September 2018
    June 2016

    Categories

    All
    Descriptions
    Gallery Visits

    RSS Feed

  • Home
  • About JK
  • Gallery 1
    • Dune
    • The Winter's Tale
    • The Raft
    • Vespers
    • Dupuytrens
    • Farewell to Stockevik
    • Gallery 2
    • Gran Via
    • Carriers
    • Isolation
    • La Malvinie
    • 16 Walpole
    • The Ghost Tanker
    • The Shipping Forecast
    • The Didcot Interpretation
    • Site
    • Lake Keitele
    • Tom Stoppard
    • The Maybe Man
    • Double Self Portrait With Knees
    • Post Ironic Iron Horse
    • Terminus
    • Cleared to Land
    • Matins
    • The Worm Forgives the Plough
    • Isolation
    • Red Spotty
    • Landed
  • Prints
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Landed
  • Et Cetera