Patrick Richmond Nicholas

Carpe Diem

Carpe Diem

  A remarkable feature of Italy is the amount of  history simply abandoned to nature. A walk in the woods can lead to a ruined church with peeling frescoes, even entire towns abandoned and overgrown or as here a Renaissance sculpture park outside Pitigliano constructed by the once powerful...

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Spirals

Spirals

  Though the name is  This Autumn Evening,  how I got there is something of a spiral.   I was intrigued by the idea of a spiral suggested by the form of the belvedere. This is the original shot. In fact the working title was Vortex. This took me to Wyndham Lewis and...

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Herm

Herm

  In the ancient world, given that fertility was of fundamental importance, sex and religion were entwined. Bacchanalian rites were famous for their eroticism. A Roman home would often have the figure of Priapus holding his oversized phallus prominently displayed by the entrance and the...

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Karshed

Karshed

  I have just finished the first biography I have ever read of a photographer, the Canadian Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002)*. So well known in the immediate post-war period that to have one's portrait taken by him was referred to as being 'Karshed'. He was an émigrée from Armenia, a survivor of...

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Fact and Phantasm

Fact and Phantasm

  Do artists still work from poetry? In the past it was common for a painter to be inspired by the poets, but is there poetry in Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' (AKA The Pickled Shark) ? I ask this as I have just finished a biography of Samuel...

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