Avocado Sweet’s My Neighbourhood column comes from the north east of England over the next few months. Lesley Manners has lived in the area for over 20 years and will be recommending the places the locals go. Today’s piece highlights Jesmond, a smart area of Newcastle popular with students and only two stops on the metro from Newcastle city centre. The main street is Osborne Road which is lined with
Artist Emily Barletta can’t see past red. In an interview for mrxstitch.com she says: ‘For years now, red has been the only colour that makes sense for me. Any other colour in an artwork is secondary. Usually if the object I’m making is red, then other colors present denote a secondary object or idea invading into the art, like a problem or a disease… Struggling with form and marks is a challenge
Next week is Burns Night, when the life and works of Scotland’s greatest poet Robert Burns will be celebrated around the world with formal gatherings, casual get togethers and perhaps the odd solitary armchair reading, glass of whisky in hand. To mark the occasion, we’re delighted to have copies of a brilliant downloadable Burns Night Companion to giveaway to three lucky readers. Worth £6.50 ($9.95), this fun and stylish guide has
David Hockney,Winter Timber, 2009, Oil on 15 canvases, 274 x 609.6 cm, Copyright David Hockney, Photo credit: Jonathan Wilkinson The biggest ever UK exhibition of landscape paintings by a living British artist opens 21 January 2012 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The exhibition includes David Hockney’s new and vivid paintings inspired by the Yorkshire landscape and some are huge in scale; the painting above is over 6 metres wide. David Hockney, Woldgate
Congratulations to Dunfermline born poet John Burnside who has won the TS Eliot Poetry Prize with his stunning latest work, Black Cat Bone. Here he ponders the lives behind the tiny skating figures in Pieter Bruegel’s Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap: We have to imagine the duties they leave behind for the thrill of the river, the kitchens and middens, the sheepfolds and clouded byres, the old folk
Photograph by Jesko Malkolm Johnsson-Zahn Here are some seductive curves to welcome you to Georgia. Usually this kind of statement architecture is reserved for city centre galleries but this is the Sarpi border customs checkpoint through which visitors from Turkey travel to Georgia. Located at the shore of the Black Sea the building was designed by Berlin architects, J. Mayer H and completed at the end of 2011. With cantilevered
Paisley born singer songwriter Gerry Rafferty is to be remembered at two concerts on 22 and 23 January as part of this year’s Celtic Connections in Glasgow. The concerts have been curated by Rafferty’s daughter Martha and Rab Noakes and will feature performances by, among others, The Proclaimers, Barbara Dickson, Ron Sexsmith and James Vincent McMorrow. Irish singer McMorrow, who sings some of his songs in a voice so high
Eve Arnold and Eva Zeisel had more than a name in common. Pioneering achievements by both artists spanned much of the 20th century and both women achieved firsts in their respective fields. Eve Arnold, who died aged 99 on the 4 of January 2012, was one of the first female photographers to join the Magnum photographic agency in 1957. Eva Zeisel, ceramics designer, who died on 30 December 2011 aged
Apologies for the recent radio silence – we’ve been having some tricky construction work done here at Avocado Sweet and it’s taken a bit longer than we expected. Hope you didn’t think we’d eaten and drunk ourselves into actual comas over the holidays! Should be all sorted soon though and we’ll be right back to daily posting.
New Year’s Eve and it’s worth looking again at Woody Guthrie’s legendary resolutions of 1942. I personally am going to adopt his ‘wash teeth if any’, ‘drink scant’ and ‘beat fascism’ as my watchwords for 2012. Happy New Year and may your ‘hoping machine keep running’…X