Country Life Magazine (October 8, 2024): The latest issue features…
Daffy goes digital
Annie Tempest’s inimitable characters totter gently into the modern age with a new website
Mud, mud, glorious mud
Dogs, birds, pigs and humans alike follow hippopotami down the hollow. Deborah Nicholls-Lee dons her wellies and joins them
A sense of time and place
Ben Pentreath unravels what makes an interior English, that indefinable, yet instantly recog-nisable and beguiling aesthetic
Made in the Marches
The border of England and Wales is proving inspiring for artisanal craftsmen, finds Arabella Youens
Mixing old and new
Country Life’s Interiors Editor Giles Kime opens the doors to his revived 17th-century cottage
New looks for a new season
From bamboo bookshelves to lamps and pots, Amelia Thorpe chooses accessories to covet
Turi King’s favourite painting
The scientist and historian picks a powerful royal portrait
Growing pains
Minette Batters takes her seat in the House of Lords
The right place to build
The historic streetscapes of our towns and cities reveal lessons we still need to learn about how to build, believes Ptolemy Dean
The legacy
Kate Green salutes Dorothy Brooke and the global equine charity that bears her name
Antlered majesty
Manmade, yet wild, deer parks prove we can create Arcadia, asserts John Lewis-Stempel
Timber of the gods
Jack Watkins admires the huge, ancient and once-exotic cedars that punctuate our landscapes
The good stuff
Hetty Lintell tallies her trinkets
Interiors
An imaginative kitchen extension and tea-tinged fabrics
Building on great bone structure
The good bones that anchor the gardens of Foscote Manor, Buckinghamshire, please the eye of George Plumptre
Foraging
John Wright raises a dram of home-made vodka to the crab apple
Operation mincemeat
Always comforting, cottage pie satisfies Tom Parker Bowles
Salt of the earth
Pick up a handful or several of salted peanuts when you’re next in the pub, urges Rob Crossan
I have news for ewe
The humble sheep changed the course of British art history, reveals Bendor Grosvenor
By the time I used the camera lucida in the museum, I’d spent several months grappling with the strange proposition offered by its prism. I’d read that the image was sharper if you held it over a dark drawing surface, but that didn’t make any sense to me until the smoked metal etching plate was beneath my hand. Suddenly the albatross skeleton appeared on it: bright, spectral. The process was different from the way I’d imagined it. There was a drag, almost a dance, under the needle – a tiny jump of resistance in the copper. Without seeing what you were doing, you could feel it more keenly. It wasn’t like ice-skating at all.
A camera lucida is an optical device used as a drawing aid by artists. The camera lucida performs an optical superimposition of the subject being viewed upon the surface upon which the artist is drawing. The artist sees both scene and drawing surface simultaneously, as in a photographic double exposure.
TRAVEL DRAWINGS
This approach stems from my own formal education and the unique 10-year period in contemporary history in which I studied architecture. Occupying both “paper” and virtual / digital environments, I learned the fundamentals at Tulane University using purely traditional architectural methods of representation. By the time I earned my Masters from Columbia University, the pedagogy had radically changed, wherein the old, analog systems of production were abandoned for a purely paperless studio that solely engaged digital technologies such as Maya, Max and Photoshop. Working within both territories, I learned that each medium has a profound effect on the way in which we draw, design and understand architectural space and form.
Pencils are discarded, as lighters and umbrellas are, because at some crucial moment they fail in their purpose. They refuse to ignite, quail before a shower, or simply snap. But pencils have merely suspended their usefulness. Their potential still lies within them. They can go on setting down by the thousand the words by which the world works.
Boomers Daily 