An Awfully Big Adventure, Set in Mongolia- Photography by Tim Walker for Vogue UK December Issue

Concave Easel by Ryan & Trevor Oakes

Twins Ryan & Trevor Oates have created this 3D machine titled Vision, which enables absolutely anyone to draw a perfectly accurate perspective drawing. The idea for the perspective device came about from studying Brunelleschi, who is renowned for creating linear perspective in the early 1400s. This inspired their product, Vision to allow one eye to look at the subject and the other to plot the drawing, in order to create a true representation of a space, as one is perceiving it there on site. 

Watch a short video on the work here.

Images: Ryan & Oakes

360° Queen Square by Ben Ashton for Bloomsbury Festival 2011

Images: My Own

Rosemary Lee's Queen Square Dances for Bloomsbury Festival 2011

Images: My Own

Poetry Under the Arbour at the Bloomsbury Festival today

Images: My Own

Cream Tea and Conversation at Persephone Books for Bloomsbury Festival 2011

As part of the Bloomsbury Festival this year, Persephone Bookshop on Lambs Conduit Street hosted a hour of cream teas, beautiful book design and conversations about women writers. Persephone Books is a delightful bookshop and publisher focusing on the neglected fiction and non-fiction works by women, for women and about women. The titles are chosen to appeal to busy women who rarely have time to spend in ever-larger bookshops and would like to have access to a list of books designed to be neither too literary nor too commercial. The books are guaranteed to be readable, thought-provoking and impossible to forget. The afternoon was a chance to speak to the owner's of the shop, as well as like-minded readers and interesting Bloomsbury residents. I was recommended Farewell Leicester Square by Betty Miller and The New House by Lettice Cooper. 

Farewell Leicester Square:

Betty Miller wrote this, her fourth novel, in 1935. In the novel Alec Berman escapes from his restrictive Jewish family in Brighton, and although he has a successful career as a film-maker (perhaps modelled on that of Alexander Korda) and marries the very English Catherine, he always feels a 'Dago: Jew: Outsider.' 'Yet,' continued Neal Ascherson, 'the rejection is not really the refusal of a snobbish Gentile world fully to accept him. The rejecting force comes from within himself.' 'A thought-provoking insight into anti-semitism between the wars,' wrote the Guardian, 'not the violent prejudice of Mosley's fascists, but the discreet discrimination of the bourgeoisie.'

The New House:

'All that outwardly happens in The New House,' writes Jilly Cooper in her Persephone preface, 'is over one long day a family moves from a large imposing secluded house with beautiful gardens to a small one overlooking a housing estate. But all the characters and their relationships with each other are so lovingly portrayed that one cares passionately what happens even to the unpleasant ones. 'The New House, first published in 1936, reminds me of my favourite author Chekhov, who so influenced Lettice's generation of writers. Like him, she had perfect social pitch and could draw an arriviste developer as convincingly as a steely Southern social butterfly.'

Images: My Own

Frida Kahlo

After watching Frida with Selma Hayek the other day, I thought I would share some colourful and revealing images of Mexican primitive painter and self-portraitist Frida Kahlo. There was recently an exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester titled 'Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera: Masterpieces from the Gelman Collection', which ran from the 9th July to the 2nd October 2011. This major international touring exhibition, featured work by both Frida Kahlo and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. The fascination with these two key figures of Mexican Modernism lies not solely with their significant body of work, but also from their renowned friendships (and consequently conflicts), striking physical appearances and both their spirited and sometimes volatile personalities. Kahlo was a feminist icon, whose self portraits openly addressed various emotional issue of love and loss, while Rivera was a socialist, famous for his vast political murals, which sometimes sparked controversy.