The Fortnightly Flag
15th August 2017
WRITING AND ART ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY STAGE AND SCREEN
WRITING AND ART
The Hive, Kew Gardens
Another must-see art event in London this summer is The Hive at Kew Gardens, an art installation intended to give an impression of what it's like to be inside a beehive, part of Kew Gardens' on-going campaign to regenerate our dwindling population of honeybees (kew.org/bees). For my part I have planted more lavender in the garden. Bees love lavender.
The Hive is in Kew Gardens until November.
Sadly by the time I got there the surrounding meadow garden had gone to seed but the Great Broad Walk, Britain's largest double border which stretches for 320 metres and is packed with 30,000 late summer perennials was gorgeous.
Art at Kew
There are two art galleries at Kew, the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art housed in a modern building linked to the 19th century Marianne North Gallery. Botanical Art is a specialist genre, usually in pencil and watercolour to record fine detail. Its purpose is to produce scientifically accurate drawings of botanical specimens. In the hands of talented artists some of these are very beautiful. The Shirley Sherwood Gallery has a fine collection. It leads to the Marianne North Gallery.
Marianne North
Marianne North, born 1830 to a wealthy and well-connected family, was an exceptionally gifted artist. Her gallery, which she commissioned and arranged herself to show her works in context, contains 848 paintings together with the panel decorations which she painted herself. Her paintings are exquisitely beautiful. She travelled across the globe recording the flora and fauna and collecting plants which she sent back to Kew as she was acquainted with the first Director, Joseph Hooker. Marianne's studies are not strictly botanical being in oils but, crucially, she painted the plants in context and additionally supplied a landscape showing the environment in which they grew.
Her landscapes are particularly fine. They are smaller than those of her male counterparts - size evidently mattered to Victorian male painters - because she was constantly on the move and needed to keep her equipment portable - but the extraordinary range of her paintings from a North American autumn to South American mountains, from India and Indonesia to Australia, New Zealand and Japan surely puts her up there with the best. No-one else that I can think of painted such a wide range of different landscapes.
The Gallery, for reasons of conservation,, has been plunged into semi-darkness, which makes it hard to see the paintings in all their vibrant colour but Kew offers for sale a very good biography "Marianne North: A very intrepid painter" by Michelle Payne shop.kew.org/kewbooksonline which gives a straight-forward and informative account of her life and work with many illustrations of her wonderful artwork.
ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY
Greek DNA Analysis reveals surprises
I studied Greek history and literature in my first year at university so have a long-standing interest in the subject. In a recent issue of Nature journal researchers published the results of their analysis of genetic data from skeletons dating from the Bronze Age. The team, led by Dr Iosif Lazardis from Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts, focussed on the Minoan Civilisation of Crete (2600 - 1000 BC) and the Mycaenean culture of mainland Greece (1600 - 1100 BC)
Most of the people appear to be local deriving 62% - 86% of their ancestry from the people who introduced agriculture to Europe from Anatolia (Turkey) in Neolithic times but the Bronze Age Mycenaean and Minoan skeletons revealed ancestry from populations originating in either the Caucasus mountains or Iran.
Between 9% and 17% of their genetic make-up came from this source. In addition, the team report the Mycenaeans, but not the Minoans, show evidence of genetic input from people who lived further north on the flat grasslands that stretch from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. Between 4% and 16% of their ancestry came from this northern source.
We were taught - based mainly on linguistic evidence - that the Mycaenean Greeks were descended from the Dorians who came from the north. This appears to be scientifically accurate and the new evidence gives us some idea who these Dorians were.
Surprisingly the researchers found no evidence of suggested migrations to Greece or Crete from ancient Egypt or from the areas of the eastern Mediterranean occupied by the Phoenicians, who were famously a sea-faring nation. This is especially surprising in the case of Crete which also had a maritime culture but only ten skeletons were examined from the island and it may be that a larger sample would provide a wider perspective.
STAGE AND SCREEN
Tom Hiddleston to play Hamlet at RADA
The Thor and Night Manager star will lead the cast in a fund-raising production of Hamlet for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) which will run from 1 - 23 September at RADA's Jerwood Vanbrugh Theatre in London. The production will be directed by Kenneth Branagh, RADA's president, who also directed Tom Hiddleston in his breakthrough movie Thor in which he plays the mischievous Norse God Loki. All proceeds will go towards RADA's Attenborough campaign to raise £20m to upgrade one of their main London sites and provide accommodation for their students.
Gina McKee at Shakespeare's Globe
Gina McKee will play the title role in a production of Boudica, a new play telling the story of Britain's famous warrior queen written by Tristan Bernays and direted by Eleanor Rhode which opens on Friday 8th September at The Globe Theatre on the South Bank. blog.shakespearesglobe.com
No comments:
Post a Comment