Tag: Africa
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An African Gem: Bushmans Kloof
I have been to many places had many adventures, few compare to the delights of Bushmans Kloof. Asked to sum up my visits by a friend, I said “Simple, this is a little piece of heaven come to earth”.
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Exploitation vs. Conservation: Wildlife Tourism in Crisis?
It is distressing for these communities and for the operators, that poaching is so endemic that it is now threatening the survivability of whole species (the Western Black Rhino, last seen in 2006,is now officially extinct). With death of these beasts come the death of the businesses that rely on their presence. Worse, far worse,…
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Design: Towards a new English vernacular?
Defining and recognising an English vernacular style, all part of a resurgence in English national awareness as Scots want to go home. Examples from Interior design, including France and Germany
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West Coast Harmonies
I never really thought of the Beach Boys as anything more than happy harmonics. West Coast surfer sound lacking the depth, emotional and musical, of the Beatles. They reflected the US West Coast in all its frothy entertainment world frivolity.
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Diamonds not wardrobes
I lay on the beach in the hot African autumn sunshine a century later. Further north the brutal isolation of the Skeleton Coast starts, but here on St. Helena’s Bay the sand was warm and the waves lay their spume, gently, barely feet away as the sea spends its energy. The South Atlantic here is…
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Landscape into Art
A few years ago there was an exhibition in London’s Serpentine Gallery called ‘Art into Landscape’. From the earliest Renaissance masters through Turner and the Impressionists, to Hockney’s brilliance, the face of our globe has been a source of visual fascination, interpretation and reinterpretation for painters. Our developing technologies have added an additional dimension to…
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Of Wood, Waves and Walking
The line of London plane trees along John Islip street at the back of the Tate gave some striking images, almost monochromatic, but relieved by gleams of the gold and eau de nil colouring of new bark. Their branches drew graphic pictures against the sky, looking like knobkerries where they had been pollarded.
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Life with the Lions
African communities have to live with wildlife, not slaughter it. It is distressing to see images of stupid hunters who think it is glorious to kill the shrinking numbers of beasts in the ever decreasing wilderness area. Much better trophies are the images ‘hunted’ in a camera, demanding the same physical skills often as those…
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Origin of the Unicorn?
The Unicorn was reputed in mythology to be cloven hoofed and horse like, both of which descriptions fit the Oryx (forgive me if I stick with the name Oryx rather than the guttural harshness of the Afrikaner Gemsbok).
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Softly Susurrating Sands in the Sossusvlei
Like the views of the Seven Sisters, the giant sand dunes in the Namibian sand sea have been snapped by hundreds of amateur and professional photographers. The fascination with landscape and the scale of our selves against it are common factors in much of todays imagery.
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