Tag Archives: Profiles

Best New Fiction Books: 57-Year Old Author Lily King’s “Writers & Lovers” – On The Road To Happiness

Writers & Lovers Lily King March 2020Writers & Lovers follows Casey―a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist―in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King’s trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.

Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Euphoria Lily KingLily King returns with another instant New York Times bestseller: an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman.

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Lily King is the author of five award-winning novels. Her most recent novel, Writers & Lovers, will be published on March 3rd, 2020. Her 2014 novel Euphoria won the Kirkus Award, The New England Book Award, The Maine Fiction Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Euphoria was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review. It was included in TIME’s Top 10 Fiction Books of 2014, as well as on Amazon, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, and Salon’s Best Books of 2014.

Lily’s website

 

 

Art Magazines: British Photographer James Kerwin Launches “The Background” (2020)

The Background Photography magazine James KerwinAs you will see from my portfolio, travel plays a huge part in my image-making. I visited nine countries in 2017 alone, and close to twenty since my journey into architectural photography began. I have always been fascinated by different cultures, foods, textures and colours. It is this love for travel, combined with my deep passion for photography, that keeps me motivated and dedicated to putting in the long lonely hours of research and logistical planning to then get out with the camera time and time again.

I hail from the fine city of Norwich in the United Kingdom, having spent the best part of thirty years growing up there it was a place I always returned to after travelling. Since January 2019 I have taken to the road full-time to undertake a nomadic lifestyle with my girlfriend Jade as we strive to grow a better photography and adventure tour business.

James Kerwin Photography

THE BACKGROUND MAGAZINE

PRODUCED THREE TIMES A YEAR, “THE BACKGROUND” IS A DIGITAL AND PREMIUM PRINT MAGAZINE THAT IS WRITTEN AND PRODUCED BY MYSELF, JAMES KERWIN. THE FIRST EDITION CONTAINS 100 PAGES AND HAS TAKEN HOURS OF THOUGHT. THE UNIQUE MAGAZINE IS PACKED FULL OF IMAGERY, TRAVEL HACKS AND TIPS AS WELL AS ADVICE ON WHERE TO PHOTOGRAPH, THINGS TO SEE AND HISTORICAL INFORMATION RELATING TO MY INTERIOR AND ABANDONED ARCHITECTURE LOCATIONS. THINK OF THIS MAGAZINE AS A TYPE OF MEMOIRS OF MY LAST FOUR MONTHS OF NOMADIC TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY.

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Profiles: 82-Year Old American Abstract Painter Larry Poons

From a Wall Street Journal online profile (March 3, 2020):

I had a handful of school friends, including Francis Ford Coppola, who was in the grade behind me. He was known then as Frank. He directed school plays, such as “Finian’s Rainbow.” That’s where I fell in love with the girl. She was a dancer in the cast.

Painting, music and poetry all spoke to me, especially music. I applied to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

Larry Poons, 82, is an abstract painter best known for his “dot” and “throw” paintings. “Larry Poons” (Abbeville), a book-length monograph of his work from the 1950s to the present, will be published in September. He spoke with Marc Myers.

The first time I painted on canvas board, I was lovesick. I had a crush on a girl in high school and had just finished reading Irving Stone’s Van Gogh biographical novel, “Lust for Life.”

I took my easel to a nearby park and painted trees. As I worked the paint with a small brush, it helped get my feelings out.

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Music Profiles: 76-Year Old Musician Robbie Robertson Talks About “Building The Band” (PBS)

The documentary “Once Were Brothers” chronicles the highs and lows of a famous rock group. Lead guitarist and songwriter Robbie Robertson began touring as a teenager and played for Bob Dylan before joining forces with four other musicians to become The Band. Jeffrey Brown reports.

Profiles: The “Stylish” Legacy Of British Author Hugo Charteris (1922-1970)

From a New Criterion online article:

Hugo Charteris The LifelineAlan Ross, for forty years The London Magazine’s editor, found Charteris “one of the most original, quirky and shrewd explorers of the behaviour of the landed gentry . . . and at a time when prose was plain, his was idiosyncratically stylish.”

When Hugo Charteris’s first novel, the haunting A Share of the World, was published in 1953 to the praise of Rosamond Lehmann (who helped to get it published), Peter Quennell, Evelyn Waugh, and Francis Wyndham (Charteris’s relation and consistent supporter), the author, just turned thirty-one, seemed set for lasting fame. It hasn’t worked that way in the The New Criterion March 2020almost five decades since his death of cancer in 1970, aged only forty-seven.

Nowadays, few people seem to know his name. This is true among not only the ever-growing majority who pay little attention to novels and novelists, but also the enlightened minority who do.

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Interviews: 84-Year Old British Photographer Don McCullin (Apollo)

From an Apollo Magazine online interview (Feb 22, 2020):

McCullin is reluctant to place himself in the company of artists, partly because he never wants to feel that he’s ‘arrived’ – ‘The moment that happens, I know I’m finished’ – but also because of the nature of his material. ‘There’s a shadow that Irreconcilable Truths by Don McCullincomes over my life when I think […] that I’ve earned my reputation out of other people’s downfall. I’ve photographed dead people and I’ve photographed dying people, and people looking at me who are about to be murdered in alleyways. So I carry the guilt of survival, the shame of not being able to help dying people.’ 

Don McCullin Vietnam and Berlin Photos from websiteOn top of a hill a few miles from Don McCullin’s house in Somerset is a dew pond, a perfectly circular artificial pond for watering livestock. Nobody knows how long it has been there; some dew ponds date back to prehistoric times, and it’s tempting to think that this one served the Bronze Age hill-fort that overlooks the site. McCullin is obsessed with the pond. For more than 30 years, whenever he has had the time, he has walked up the hill and stood there with his camera waiting for the right moment to take a photograph. Often, the moment never comes: he can spend hours there, just looking. ‘It’s as if it has a hold over me,’ he tells me when I visit him at home in early January. ‘I can’t leave it alone, I photograph it all the time. And yet I think I’ve done my best picture the first time I ever did it. I can’t tell you how.’

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Artists: Spanish Painter Joan Miró’s “Endlessly Creative” Printmaking

Excerpts from a Christie’s online article (Feb 28, 2020):

Joan Miró Christie's
Joan Miró

Like Pablo Picasso, his compatriot and peer, Miró had an unwavering commitment to printmaking. Also like Picasso, he created more than 2,000 works in the medium. It’s often said that Miró’s fondness for calligraphic lines — such a distinctive feature of his paintings — lent itself naturally to graphic work.

‘In terms of both the quality and quantity of his output, Joan Miró was one of the most important printmakers of the 20th century,’ says Murray Macaulay, Head of Prints at Christie’s in London.

Joan Miró Prints Christie'sThe son of a watchmaker, Joan Miró was born in Barcelona in 1893. He moved to Paris in the early 1920s and soon joined the Surrealist movement. He also befriended a host of avant-garde writers, such as Max Jacob, Tristan Tzara, Antonin Artaud, André Breton and Paul Eluard.

The first prints Miró ever made were illustrations for Tzara’s 1930 book of poems, L’arbre des Voyageurs. Literary sources would prove to be a constant inspiration for him, with notable examples including Alfred Jarry’s play, Ubu Roi; Stephen Spender’s poem, Fraternity; and the mystic, medieval text, Canticle of the Sun, by St Francis of Assisi.

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Video Profiles: 91-Year Old Bob Moore, Founder Of Bob’s Red Mill (CBS)

At 91, Bob Moore is an unexpected celebrity in the natural and organic foods industry, as the face of the company he founded, Bob’s Red Mill. He talks with correspondent Luke Burbank about his recipe for success.

Bob’s Red Mill is a brand of whole-grain foods marketed by employee-owned American[3] company Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods of Milwaukie, Oregon. The company was established in 1978 by Bob and Charlee Moore.

Bob MooreBob’s Red Mill Natural Foods is a producer of natural, certified organic, and gluten-free milled grain products, billing itself as the “nation’s leading miller of diverse whole-grain foods.” Its products are distributed throughout the United States, Canada, and a number of other locations such as the Caribbean. It produces over 400 products, primarily whole grains that are ground with quartz millstones which come from several 120-year-old mills, as well as baking mixes, beans, seeds, nuts, dried fruits, spices, and herbs. They are sold through seventy natural food and specialty grocery distributors in the United States and Canada, their online store, and the company’s factory store and restaurant.

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From Wikipedia

Profiles: The Family Reviving “Noble & Murat” Port – “Foot Treading” And “Chestnut Barrels”

Antonio Taveira’s family breathes new life into the illustrious Noble & Murat brand whose tradition as a port house started over a century and half ago in 1831 as one of the first bottlers to mention “LBV” on their label. 

The family has a long history of precision hand-harvesting, distinguished sourcing and methodical vinification. For decades they have provided grapes for Taylor’s, Croft, Sandeman’s among others, but now they have decided to keep the best grapes for their own wines.

Noble & Murat Port and LBV Port