In an interview with Jeremy Isaacs from 1995, John Berger is asked how he would like to be remembered. As is so often the case, there's a long pause while he thinks. Then he finds the right words, and he answers, smiling: "By what I've brought back." I love this answer because it epitomises what [...]
This film is unique in the way that it is composed entirely of animated paintings, based upon a live action shoot. Around 65,000 frames were created- the first frame was painted as a full painting, and the subsequent frames were painted over the top. The extraordinary amount of dedication, time, effort and skill that went [...]
“There’s something of Rembrandt in Shakespeare,” wrote Vincent van Gogh in 1880. He saw Shakespeare’s language as “the equal of any brush trembling with fever and emotion.” Other thinkers, such as critic Hippolyte Taine and poet William Ernest Henley, have also commented on the link between Shakespeare and Rembrandt. Although operating within different cultural frameworks, [...]
This is an essay I wrote for a competition run by the English department of my sixth form college. It came in 2nd place. Literature and art are arguably two sides of the same cultural coin. Both seek to express emotion, articulate ideas or evoke a specific time and place, and their differing tools of [...]
How to define Caravaggio? In Andrew Graham-Dixon’s book ‘Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane’, he argues, as the title suggests, that he is best described by the blurring of the division between religious intensity and visceral earthiness. Whilst creating images of extraordinary religious potency, Caravaggio clashed with the law again and again. Over the course [...]
