Don’t snarl at the beach resort – Sandals is a great way to experience Jamaica On his show Parts Unknown, Anthony Bourdain spoke of the “Two Jamaicas”. There’s the Jamaica where citizens “live, cook and struggle” — what he calls the “Real Jamaica”. And then, he says, there’s the Jamaica “you’re probably more familiar with”. As he says it, we see a sunburned tourist, cocktail in hand, splashing in the [...]
Best of travel: Why Panama is Latin America’s hot holiday destination To tide us over until we’re able to travel again, we’re republishing classic travel stories from our archives. Today we revisit Alex Dymoke’s trip to Panama to see if it really is all hats and canals. ••• In Britain, Panama is famous for two things: the canal and canoe man. Back in 2002, John Darwin [...]
Dead glam: Anja Niemi is both subject and photographer in her new exhibition The only thing Anja Niemi likes more than taking photographs is being photographed herself. The Norwegian photographer combined the two to great effect in her series Do Not Disturb and Starlets and has done so again in Darlene and Me, her latest show opening at Fulham’s Little Black Gallery next month. In the dramatically staged [...]
Super stars: Award-winning landscape photographer Murray Fredericks exhibits recent works December 3, 2014 William Wordsworth wrote of a “sense sublime, something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky.” A “sense sublime” is a good way of describing the feelings induced by the work of Australian photographer Murray Fredericks, whose stunning landscapes [...]
Pop idol: British artist Allen Jones receives an overdue Royal Academy retrospective October 28, 2014 While Andy Warhol was throwing wild parties in The Factory on East 47th Street, another of pop art’s leading lights was plying his trade in an altogether less glamorous corner of the world. In 1961, Southampton-born Allen Jones took up a teaching position at Croydon College of Art after being expelled from the Royal [...]
Sohei Nishino’s dazzling Diorama Maps return to the Michael Hoppen Gallery October 28, 2014 The ancient art of map-making is hardly an art at all; minute precision and scientific attention to detail are the sacred virtues of the cartographer. But imagine a map of a different kind, one that reveals not the brute fact of a city’s physical landscape but the energy of its bustling streets. These are [...]
The art of theft: Why do thieves steal famous paintings when they’re so hard to sell? October 28, 2014 On a freezing Stockholm evening just before Christmas 2000, a group of six to eight Middle Eastern men put into action a plan they’d been working on for months. The group parked cars in the middle of the three central roads leading to the Swedish National Museum and set them ablaze. As fire engines [...]
Why Bartholomew Beal is set be a future master July 29, 2014 Figures stand isolated, lost in unfinished landscapes of saturated planes and floating shapes. Bartholomew Beal’s paintings are as open-ended as they are dramatic, as lurid as they are dark, as rich with meaning as they are ill-defined. At only 24, Beal is already a master of ambiguity. It should come as no surprise, then, that [...]
The godfather of fashion photography July 29, 2014 With a life spanning the whole of the 20th century, Horst P Horst (1906-1999) documented a number of momentous changes in the worlds of photography and style. One of the first fashion photographers to perfect the use of colour, the German-American also charted the glory days of haute couture in pre-war Paris and the explosion [...]
Meet elBulli’s Ferran Adrià: We interview the world’s greatest chef July 29, 2014 Once upon a time, the language of culinary pretension was French. If a chef wanted to bump up the prices on his menu, all he had to do was add a dash of “jus”, a splash of “vin”, perhaps a little “petit”. French words forged a connection between whatever slop the chef was serving up [...]
