New Year, New Possibilities!

This year I'm in a new city with many new, shiny possibilities. Although this meant several heartfelt goodbyes to five fantastic years in London I'm committed to making 2014 a really great year! 

So, how am I going to do this? Well here is my plan of action:


1. Read more! Escapism, learning, facts, joy, hurt, humour, new words, new perspectives....books have it in spades.

2. Keep fit...and enjoy it.

Last year I started a routine of running twice a week and I kept it up. This year I really want to maintain this and work on my strength too, just like these lovely ladies...go team!

3. Art, Art and more Art! Always room for more art in my life.

4. Lets be friends! I'm going to step outside of my comfort zone and be open to meeting new people. Friends make life amazing, bearable, fun and interesting and I think there is always room for more! 

5. And finally....I am going to keep this statement in mind:

P.s. Thank you to Pinterest for these photos.

An easy and fast summer-time cake

Last week I baked this cake for a not-for-profit market stall. Although I had to rush off to work, I have it on good authority that people actually parted with their hard earned money for a slice, so it can't be too bad!

My only concerns were that I didn't have much time and I also needed it to withstand the stifling heat currently engulfing London. I didn't want it to end up a gooey mess on the tube floor.

Luckily I found this easy-peasy recipe for a Raspberry Bakewell Cake on the BBC Good Food website, which has everything I love - almonds, berries, no wilting butter-creams and it's super fast to make.

Here is the recipe in case you want to give it a go:

Ingredients

140g ground almonds

140g butter, softened

140g golden caster sugar

140g self-raising flour

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

250g raspberries

2 tbsp flaked almonds

icing sugar, to serve

Method:

Heat oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4 and base-line and grease a deep 20cm loose-bottomed cake tin. Blitz the ground almonds, butter, sugar, flour, eggs and vanilla extract in a food processor until well combined.

Spread half the mix over the cake tin and smooth over the top. Scatter the raspberries over, then dollop the remaining cake mixture on top and roughly spread – you might find this easier to do with your fingers. Scatter with flaked almonds and bake for 50 mins until golden. Cool, remove from the tin and dust with icing sugar to serve.

Enjoy!

[photography by Katie & Percy]

F is for...

I am now the proud owner of this gorgeous flamingo screenprint by the artist Patrizio Belcampo which was printed through Edinburgh Printmakers. It was purchased today at the London Print Fair, which I visited for work purposes, but somehow came away with a sizeable framed print for myself. But how could I leave without this fancy fella? 

I really love flamingos, and have done since I was little. The description in Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland of Alice and The Queen of Hearts playing a game of croquet with these gangly birds has always stuck with me. In fact, my first overseas adventure at the age of 25 was to the Atacama Desert in Chile to see flamingos graze the high salt lakes. In summary I am a flamingo fan, they’re pink and their knees bend the other way…the other way!

I'm also a great admirer of the pared-down block style Belcampo is using. This style was so effectively exploited in the wood-block illustrations of the British artist William Nicholson (1872-1949) in his publications: An Almanac of Twelve Sports and London Types. It worked in 1890 and it works today.

Plus I'm a sucker for letterpress or anything that looks like letterpress, and have a little collection of items in this ilk. 

Norman Rockwell

The iconic New York artist Norman Rockwell is best remembered for his detailed paintings that appeared on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post from 1916 – 1963. Let me break that down…that’s 47 years and 321 covers. After this he moved over to Look magazine for a further ten years. He also designed work for numerous advertising campaigns owing much to his broad appeal. Some art critics often used his close relationship with commercial art to dilute his standing as an artist in his own right. 

Rockwell’s knack for capturing small-town American life with humour and reflection, along with his realistic style made him popular in his own time and today. 

You can visit The Norman Rockwell Museum situated in the artist’s old stomping ground of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and in 2011 a major exhibition of his work titled Norman Rockwell’s America was exhibited at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Dulwich Picture Gallery Norman Rockwell Museum

Flair for the unusual

Unusual is the word that Mr Meyer used to describe his apartment in Piccadilly, London after I had been offered a tour of the downstairs rooms. Unusual, because it was the physical embodiment of his late wife Fleur Cowles, who was by all accounts extra-ordinary. Set in one of London’s most sought after locations, the interior of the house was well…it was very unusual. It was peculiar, unique, giddy, a fusion of grand, personal and kitsch. It was both tacky and elegant. Above all it was filled to the brim with a vibrant personality. 

Fleur was quite a woman and there is much written about her life, art, work and friendships. In fact she wrote a book about it titled She made friends and kept them. Fleur was a socialite with many deep connections. One photograph to catch my eye while I frantically tried to take in every inch of the apartment was of Fleur as a young woman sitting in a hotel room having a picnic with Cary Grant. Apparently it was raining that day so they decided to continue their picnic indoors. I suppose would too if I had Mr Grant at my disposal. 

However, it is her role as editor and creator of the influential but short-lived magazine Flair, that she is perhaps most regarded. In 1950 Fleur’s dream of producing a magazine unlike any other was realised. Flair was a sophisticated publication that encompassed art, fashion, lifestyle, design, travel and literature, which was appealing to both men and women. It was characterized with special features that while bespoke and wonderful to behold resulted in significant costs. This and a lack of advertising revenue swiftly brought about its termination only one year later.

Speaking about Flair, Fleur Cowles said:

“There was no point in creating yet another magazine frozen to the format of competitors who specialized either in literature, fashion, travel, art, decor or entertainment. Why not put all of these in one magazine? This I decided to do. We intended Flair to be the most beautiful monthly publication anywhere, a new dimension in magazine publishing for the five classic fields that concern human activity; art, literature, entertainment, travel and fashion. In doing so, we introduced to the magazine such names as Jean Cocteau, Tennessee Williams, W.H. Auden, Christopher Sykes, Barbra Ward, Saul Steinberg, Lucian Freud and Simone de Beauvoir."

This entry is a little salute to a life lived with flair. 

Tim Walker photography

If I could be photographed by anyone in the world, Tim Walker would be up there with the likes of Cartier Bresson. It’s a big call but Walker’s photographs are romantic, crazy, Alice-in-Wonderland trips of colour. 

They are extraordinary and most incredibly they are not digitally manipulated. Everything in his photographs are realised in reality. They represent the finished product of an immense design effort that encompasses a team of fashion and set designers, models, giant hand-built or sourced props, unique locations and everything else in between. 

His exhibition Story Teller at Somerset House, London, displays some of his bespoke props alongside his quirky and unique visions, which have been published for many years in Vogue (American, British, French and Italian versions). 

As I jostled for viewing space in this heavily popular exhibition (it seemed that half of London’s fashion students had like me left it to the final day), I was drawn to his consistent use of flowers. Like his models they are a constant ingredient and take on many forms. Soft and dreamy, hard or seductive, he uses blooms as both a backdrop and the star of the show.  Each image is impressively curated much like a bride’s bouquet, and whether on a grand scale or more intimately as seen in the Kate Moss series, Walker’s flowers are a celebration of natural beauty and limitless dreams.

All photographs are by Tim Walker: timwalkerphotography.com

Mariko Mori

I’m a big fan of the Japanese artist Mariko Mori and was pleased as pie to learn that she was holding her first exhibition in London in well over a decade – and the best bit – it was only 5 minutes from my work!

Mori ‘s art is a seamless mix of tradition and technology. While eastern spiritually feature heavily in her creations, her tools are those of the 21st century. Her photographs, installations, sound-scapes and sculptures are veritable digital playgrounds of a futuristic landscape to explore. Instantly recalling popular Japanese animated culture, her work is like Sailor Moon meets Mother Nature.

In Mori’s current exhibition Rebirth, showing at the Royal Academy London until February 17, the New York based artist takes her cue from the cyclical nature of life and death.

One of the most impressive pieces of the exhibition is typically alien in appearance. Titled Tom Na H-Lu II (2006), it is an imposing glass monolith with science at its core. Connected to a computer in Japan that records energy from a supernova (death of a star) in space, this beautiful statue comes alive as hundreds of LED lights react to an event that occurred in a distant solar system.

Persistent throughout this exhibition is a blanketing calm. Several dark rooms with pods pulsating soft light in hypnotic rhythms keep me in a state of Zen. Their circular formations are based on prehistoric ceremonial sights such as Stonehenge in England and Jomon culture in Japan and emphasise a circle theme both physically and metaphorically. Added to this the clean, white palette suggests a purity that feels entirely otherworldly and at the same time like being inside a big ovarian filled womb.

As her voice sweetly narrates over a film explaining her site-specific artwork ‘Sun Pillar’, 2011, it is clear that Mariko Mori intends to combine the celestial with the terrestrial. Her world is quite simply heaven on earth.