Cecil Collins, Burra+ other English artists

John Piper, Welsh Landscape, 1950, oil on canvas, 51 x 61 cm. Wolverhampton Art Gallery, W. Midlands, England.

Morning (United Kingdom, 1943) Cecil Collins

Graham Sutherland: Western Hills A short break in Pembrokeshire set me off in search of painters whose work reflects the shapes and forms, the light and shade of the land. Like Cornwall, this corn…

Graham Sutherland - Thistles and Sun 1945

✽ john piper - 'park place' (fawley bottom, nr henley-on-thames) - 1944 - oil on board - christie's

Artwork page for ‘The Cells of Night’, Cecil Collins, 1934 'The Cells of Night' is one of the earliest paintings in which Collins expressed his ideas about the life of the human spirit. The human head in the foreground represents the psyche while the landscape behind, seen in dramatic recession, represents infinity. The distortion of the head symbolises the human psyche's yearning for infinity. The 'Cells' of the title refer to the multitude of organisms and natural phenomena that make up…

Graphite, crayon, chalk, pastel, watercolour, and oil on paper, 58 pages, 4 pages and back cover are missing, 268 × 208 mm This sketchbook contains a series of drawings of the interior of a room in Sutherland's house at Menton, the Villa Blanche, looking out through the tall windows. There are also several studies for the portraits of Max Egon, Prinz von Furstenberg (painted 1958-90) and Arpad Plesch (1961), and for such pictures as 'The Pine' 1959 and 'The Scales' 1961.

Artwork page for ‘The Sleeping Fool’, Cecil Collins, 1943 Collins used the character of 'The Fool' as an actor in many of his paintings. For him the Fool represented a state of innocence and spiritual purity. In an essay entitled 'The Vision of the Fool' Collins explained that he saw the qualities of the Fool as essential to creativity and inspiration: 'The saint, the artist, and the poet are all one in the Fool, in him they live, in him the poetic imagination of life lives.' In this…

Artwork page for ‘Adam and Eve’, Cecil Collins, c.1933

Birdman, 1948, Cecil Collins. English (1908 - 1989)

Artwork page for ‘The Music of Dawn’, Cecil Collins, 1988 'The Music of Dawn' depicts a golden priestess dressed in flowing drapery and holding a pilgrim's staff, standing on the seashore. Collins believed that we are all pilgrims on a journey back to the Paradise that we once knew, and that one of the functions of art was to help us on this journey. From the 1960s onwards Collins painted grand images of angels as spiritual messengers of light and love. Here a golden light suffuses the scene…

Well, Christmas is very nearly upon us. I still have my own cards to write out and send but I think everything else is done. I cannot believe that we are nearly into 2011. Where did the past ten years go? I hope all your arrangements and celebrations are going according to plan. I will probably do one more blog post and then rest until the New Year in order to recharge my blogging (or is that flagging) batteries. This is a digital drawing using a favourite colour combination pink and pale…

Lying in bed ill - especially if you are not too ill to read webpages on the laptop - allows for an amiably non-scholarly kind of research into all manner of varied and tenuously connected subjects. A chance meeting with an old scrap of paper that fell out of my sketchbook reminded me that I had been very much taken with the work of Cecil Collins at the Blake exhibition in March, and so it began... Quite a long time and much exclaiming and clicketyclicking later I am fascinated to find that…

Lying in bed ill - especially if you are not too ill to read webpages on the laptop - allows for an amiably non-scholarly kind of research into all manner of varied and tenuously connected subjects. A chance meeting with an old scrap of paper that fell out of my sketchbook reminded me that I had been very much taken with the work of Cecil Collins at the Blake exhibition in March, and so it began... Quite a long time and much exclaiming and clicketyclicking later I am fascinated to find that…

Cecil Collins - Related Artist Discovery - Cecil Collins

Cecil Collins: Man in Meditation, 1942