viscera
ISSUE ONE, APRIL 2012
CHALLENGING THE NORM: AN ART FILLED MELBOURNE WAREHOUSE // FROM NZ TO BANGKOK: THE LATEST IN ARCHITECTURE // MODERNISM AND VASTU SHASTRA IN INDIA // FRENCH FLEA MARKET STYLE IN SYDNEY // THE // MYSTERIOUS ART OF PERFUMERY // DESIGNING WITH BAMBOO // CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS // A GARDEN WITH WIT // DESIGN TO COVET
$8.95 2012 NZ $9.99
IN THIS ISSUE ISSUE ONE, APRIL 2012 FEATURES
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IN THE DETAILS KEEPING TIME Sydney interior designer Sally Greenaway cares for the small things in life
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A visit to France inspired the conversion of a Melbourne bakery stately home
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LIGHT & SHADE RAW TALENT Textile designer Dominique Kieffer’s elegant Parisian eyrie is a laboratory of style
Natalie Raw is a young architect who has cut her teeth on a crisp pavilion in New Zealand
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Leave your heart in San Francisco
Bordello chic on the Sydney bar scene
TRAVEL NEWS
GOLDEN AGE
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The green, green grasses of home
International innovations
GARDEN NEWS
APARTMENT TRENDS
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POSITANO
Perched on the Italian coast, is a beautiful house which does wonders with antique tiles
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ART & SOUL
Displaying art and open-plan living can sometimes compete. Here’s how it’s done harmoniously
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BAWA BOWER
A romantic plantation stay in Sri Lanka
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HOME ENTERTAINMENT Big sounds, small scale
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It’s a new world up on the roof
Wonderful Woolloomooloo
Bijou style in Sydney’s Potts Point
TOP MARKS
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LIVING VOGUE
Out and about with Missoni Home
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ON REFLECTION
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SOURCES
Contact details for all the products, the shops and the people in this issue of VISCERA
SMALL WONDER
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PASSIONS
Akira Isogawa’s ten favourite things
DESIGN + THINGS WE'VE SEEN & LOVED Writer Natalie Bannister
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Congratulations to Brisbane’s own Jason bird from luxxbox following the recent debut show of his homegrown super talents to an international design audience in New York City in may for the 22nd annual international convention furniture fair (ICFF). Luxxbox earned a place at the fair after undergoing an extensive entry and review process resulting in them being granted highly sough after exhibition space. And as the only Australian design studio and Australian company to successfull y progress through the selection process and exhibit at this years event- and a Brisbane boy to boot! – It’s a big shout out to a very talented designer whose designs we have long admired and appreciated. Picture: Vapor light by Jason Bird for Luxxbox. • www.luxxbox.com
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The latest product release from design due Nicholas Karlovasitis and Sarah Gibson of DesignByThem transforms an iconic Australian building and roofing material into a sophisticated, functioning ornamental object for the home. The aptly named Corro Bowl may have all the strength and durability of corrugated iron sheeting, but in its new incarnation it has shown a chic turn as a platform for fruit, a table centerpiece or display of objet d’art! This is what we love about DesignByThem – they have the knack for taking everyday items and transforming them in to smart, savvy design pieces that take the notion of recycling to a whole new level of contemporary cool the corro bowl is available through the designers and selected retails. • www.designbythem.com
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Illustrating the Maori mythology of birds, or ‘Kaitaki’, original guardians of the land, ‘Icarus – Freedom in Balance’ was created by New Zealand designer David Trubridge and shows as an installation for the Super studio Piu at the recent Milan Design Week in April. Made up of three wings that from spirals around ‘Sola’, a sun form, accompanied by Trubridge’s well known Coral light, this latest installation is a highlight of David’s unique designs, and a simply studding expression in form and organically driven beauty in modern designs! We rate him as one of the antipodes, if not one of the world’s most outstanding, ethically-minded, ironic designers. • www.davidtrubridge.com
Another Brisbane designer making it big overseas is Darcy Clarke, who was invited by the curator of the annual Salone Satellite to present designs representing Australia in a projected titled ‘Oceania’ for the recent Salone Satellite in April in Milan. With the them ‘designing the world’, the show was not only a huge opportunity for Darcy to exhibit his beautiful, organic inspired lighting and furniture designs alongside a plethora of talented designers from around the globe, it has also been the catalyst for a range of interesting collaborations which produce new designs products over the coming 2 months. Picture is on of Darcy’s attest lighting designs, the beautiful Cruzada. • www.darcyclarke.com
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DESIGN & THINGS WE'VE SEEN & LOVED
5 Julie Paterson from cloth is one of our favorite Australian textile designers, so we were excited to hear about her new range of wallpapers for the Porters’ Paints design series ‘Designers for Porter’s Paints’. Joining the likes of Catherine Martine, Bowie Wong and Bholu, the new collection from cloth gives new life to Paterson’s trademark fabrics in native-inspired geometric prints and earthy, natural colours- ‘From the Land’ cloth wallpaper is based on six of cloth’s favorite designs and had crafted in batches, produced exclusively and available through Porter’s Paints stores and stockists nationally. Pictured is Boardwalk’. • www.clothfabric.com, www.porterpaints.com
On the hunt recently for the perfect feature chair for a chic inner city apartment, we came across the divinely decadent Bloom chair by Kenneth Cobonpue and fell in total lust! Wrap us up in hand stitched ‘petals’ and call us Tinkerbelle! Inspired directly by nature, the Bloom club chair comes in the most divine range of deep red, citrus and moss greens and yellow, its more like a striking piece of art that a mere piece of furniture. The design took out the Coup de Coeur Award at the September 2009 Maison et Object Paris, and is available here in Australia through Ke-zu. • www.kezu.com.au
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We have a thing about wallpaper actually…maybe its because we adore colour and prints, or because we love being a little over the top and brave in our seasonal décor fixations, but whatever the reason, we hear wallpaper! And we keep going back to the collections from modern wallpaper design specialists, Scandinavian Wallpaper & Décor, when we need a big hit of ‘wow’. Their latest addition to their extensive collection of panoramic wallpaper and photo-based wallpaper is the totally awesome urban jungle series- calling in a ‘feature wall’ would be a understatement in any home. Check it out at www.wallpaperdecor.com.au.
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STATE THEATRE CENTRE Transparency, opacity and the urban experience are brought to the fore in Kerry Hill Architects’ state theatre centre for Perth. Review Philip Goldswain
Photography Robert Frith and Adrian Lambert, Acorn Photo
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STATE THEATRE CENTRE
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HE State Theatre Centre (STC), designed by Kerry Hill Architects, sits elegantly on the edge of one of Perth’s least attractive urban environments. Once the site of the Governor Broome Hotel but more recently a car park, the STC is located on a small site that was selected for the transformative potential a new building on the periphery of the maligned Cultural Centre might offer. It wasn’t always this way: James Street, which bisects the cultural “precinct”, was once an impressive, gently sloping nineteenth-century street lined with restrained but solid gold-rush-era buildings including police barracks, the Perth’s Boys’ and Girls’ School (now the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts), a museum and a library. It has been a significant site in the colonial city as the location for the river settlement’s first gaol. However in the late 1970s the area was paved, stepped and pedestrianized. These “improvements” were accomplished by the insertion of a new library and art gallery, which ignored
A meeting room inside the State Theatre Centre of Western Australia, by Acorn Photo.
the historical datum of the street and instead pursued an exploration of their own internalised Kehnian geometry. Almost immediately the Cultural Centre seemed condemned to perpetual redesign. To the west the precinct is bound by Northbridge, a monocultural entertainment zone, empty by day and, by night, the subject of journalistic sensationalism. However, a small glimmer of Northbridge’s urban potential can be seen in the series of independent shops, the mix of Asian grocers and restaurants (and Lyon’s’ hulking new TAFE) along William Street north to the inner-city suburbs of Highgate and Mount Lawley. A busy Roe Street and soon-to-be sunk railway sit to the south of the STC, part of a redevelopment area which is anchored at its far west end by the Perth Arena designed by ARM and Cameron Chisholm and Nicol with American firm RTKL, still under construction. The unanimous winner of the twostage competition instigated by the Department of Culture and the Arts and
run by the Urban Design Centre’s inaugural director Ruth Durack, the Kerry Hill Architects scheme is remarkable for the deft move of stacking the brief ’s two largest programmatic elements – the 575-seat proscenium arch theatre and a smaller, flexible “black box” studio theatre – on top of one another. This liberated the ground plane of the tight and difficult site and effectively allowed for the provision of two extra theatre spaces – the open-air main courtyard and the rehearsal room for the black box. The scheme’s formal strategy articulates the individual programmatic elements as a series of rectilinear volumes clad in a palette of materials that are robust, refined and glamorous and pragmatic. None of the geometry is “pure”; instead its elements are incomplete, overlapped or notched into one another, creating a density to the architectural composition. While much of Perth’s public architecture is stand-alone building located in open landscapes or plazas, visiting the STC is a profoundly urban experi-
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ence. The architecture has integrated the building into its W illiam and James Streets context while dignifying Roe Street and addressing the Perth CBD across the railway. The stretch of William Street that the STC engages is predominately a two- and three-story streetscape, and the folded form of the entry canopy and the crisp roof of the new upper-floor tenancy acknowledge the height and setback of the existing buildings. The concrete-clad theatre and its white Danpalon fly tower step up in height significantly but sit comfortably in the context, with the larger buildings set behind in the Cultural Centre. As well as these urban-scaled contextual gestures, Kerry Hill Architects has exploited the opportunities for more fine grained integration. An existing gap between two shopfronts was wide enough to accommodate a staircase that leads up to the upper-floor tenancy. Another staircase has been inserted between the main courtyard walkway and the adjacent Perth Men’s Hostel. The two-story Chester Building has been refurbished,
with a shared interior language in the fitout of the new green room and actors’ dressing rooms. The existing tenancies on William Street have been redesigned and re-engineered to exploit their connection to the theatre’s main courtyard, with large doors making them essentially double-fronted spaces. One shopfront was removed to allow a generous entrance into the courtyard. One could anticipate that the entrance and covered pathway canopy through to James Street could soon become one of those sorts of cuts used by people who understand their own city. Despite my initial hesitation that the newly inserted landscaped courtyard gardens might diminish the tight urban qualities of the relationship between the new and existing buildings, these spaces offer another layer of urban permeability, framing views through to the Per th Institute of Contemporary Arts and Arts House while allowing light into the theatre’s green room and offices on the north side of the building.
THE ASCENT UP THE MAIN STAIRCASE LEAVES BEHIND THE QUOTIDIAN MATERIALS OF THE CONCOURSE AND RECALLS THE TRADITION OF GRAND THEATRICAL STAIRCASES...
The Bronze Box at the State Theatre Centre. Photography by Acorn Photo.
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STATE THEATRE CENTRE
The Heath Ledger Theatre at the State Theatre Centre of Western Australia, by Acorn Photo.
The openness of the courtyard and entries contacts with more obscured aspects of the building. During the day the close arrangement of bronzed anodized vertical fins on the main foyer, the reflectivity of the glass and curtain of gold anodized aluminium tubes combines to screen the space from the exterior. The Roe Street elevation continues this play of transparency, opacity, thinness and solidity with the clear-glazed rehearsal room and the black film-backed glass of the elevator core overlayed with the slender steel structure of the balcony. At night these relationships change: the bronze foyer cladding recedes, with the emphasis shifting to the luminous glow of the gold interior. The white fly tower uniform and stark against a cloudless Perth sky, achieves a satisfyingly uneven luminosity at dusk. The ascent up the main staircase leaves behind the quotidian materials of the concourse and recalls the tradition of grand theatrical staircases like that of Garnier’s Paris Opéra or, closer to home, William Wolfe’s His Majesty’s Theatre. As you ascend the stairs you are con-
fronted by the spectacular installation of dense, floating canopy of aluminium tubes. With three variations in tube length, a seemingly random arrangement and different lighting across day and night, the ceiling has a shimmering intensity. Combined with the screens that define the edge of the foyer space, this is a prolonged threshold that offers ample opportunity for the spectacle of arrival at the main theatre. Until this point in the journey, the emphasis has been on movement through the building and a visual spatial connection to its context. The exception to both this and the rectilinear geometry of the STC is the timber-clad “drum” of the main theatre. Here, cocooned in its lining of variegated Tasmanian blackwood and sinuous gold balcony, the sole focus is the activity of the stage. The theatre is intimate – smaller in scale and steeper in rank than the photographs suggest. While the foyers, stairs and voids allow you to view activity over almost three levels, here the timber ceiling baffles contain the space. The precision of the acoustics allows for
vocal performance to be unamplified and, despite the depth of a very generous stage, the interaction between the audience and performer is immediate. Leaving the main theatre and descending to its foyer offers the most articulate rendering of the relationships between the spaces of the STC. Here the threshold is realized as a gap through a glass ceiling, louvered but lit by the sky so you read the drum contained by the warm grey concrete box. Much of the success of the STC, outside of its assured performance as a theatre, will be activation of its groundfloor space through tenanting and management. The courtyard needs to work as urban space as much as a performance space. To this end, the decision not to install a mature jacaranda in the courtyard may be rued. Bars, restaurants or others uses that could spill into the space and simulate activity outside of performances need to be encouraged. The use of the Chester Building’s ground-floor tenancy as office space and the resulting lack of engagement with the street is an indication of the fragility of that
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SPECS OF THE STATE THEATRE CENTRE OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA
interface. At a more ambitious level, the architect has provided a series of flexible and considered performance spaces that challenge the resident companies to find ways to use them. That the upper courtyard gallery and main theatre stage are on the same level, and that the two underground areas can expand into one performance space, suggests the potential for commissioned works to exploit the specific nature of the architectural space. In my assessment of the competition scheme (Architecture Australia, March/ April 2006) I had misread the finegrained urban engagement that the built scheme presents and accused the project of ignoring the Cultural Centre. Instead of turning its back, the STC looks at the shifting environment around it – the new urban link that will sit atop the sunken railway, the “revitalization” of the Cultural Centre and Northbridge – and makes an eloquent argument for the importance of architectures role in those changes. In the process, it sets a new benchmark for public architecture in Perth. • Phillip Goldswain is a lecturer in architecture at the University of Western Australia.
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architect Kerry Hill Architects – project team Kerry Hill, Simon Cundy, Justin Hill, Patrick Kosky, Albano Daminato, Terry Galvin, Bernard Lee, Tan Cheng Ling, Helena Nikola, Andrew Yang, Chin Siew Chin, Nina Van der Grinten, Elizabeth Armstrong, William Stuart, Ryan Brown, Rhys Bowring, Phivo Georgiou, Dean Adams, Richard Stone and Angeline Tan project manager NS Projects theatre technical consultant Marshall Day Entertech acoustic consultant Marshall Day mechanical & fire engineer Aurecon electrical, lift, hydraulic and fire engineer Wood and Grieve service engineer, acoustics and esd Aecom structural and civil engineer Airey Taylor Consultants facade engineer Meinhardt Facade Technology landscape architect Tierra Design heritage architect Kelsall Benit Architects bca consultant JMG Building Surveyors lighting design Electrolight public art coordinator Maggie Baxter signage Opening night by Acorn Photo.
Block Branding
MARTYN THOMPSON'S INTERIOR CINEMA There is nothing black-and-white about the interior worlds encountered by the enigmatic photographic images of New York-based Australian photographer Martyn Thompsons. Writer Jan Jones
Photography Martyn Thompsons
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HERE is nothing black-and-white about the interior worlds encountered by the enigmatic photographic images of New York-based Australian photographer Martyn Thompsons. His work clearly eschews the oeuvre and intellectual sophistication of black-and-white imagery. He is not a minimalist, at least in the accepted sense, but his work often instills ideals of less being more through imagination rather than things material. Thompson’s photographs are the result of a highly organised and professional attitude which has no doubt contributed to his success and heavy workload across the high-end worlds of photography and design throughout the New York, London, Paris, Rome spectrum for more than twenty years. Late 2011 will mark the launch of the first monograph on his work, Interiors – Martyn Thompson. The long-ago shift from stone and timber’s warm and cosy ambience to cement and steel’s cool refinement and functionality is well documented. But the latter was never a major part of Thompson’s brilliant schema. For him, black-and-white thrives on a different
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kind of contrast. His early aesthetic was and remains highly coloured, often painterly in fact, and more than just a little tinged with the sensuality and rich tones and textures of the Baroque. Even so, there exists an effusive confidence and mastery when his commissioned work requires a shift towards more monochromatic tones. An understanding of chiaroscuro often emboldens his photographs. Light and dark and the subtle variants in between are poised delicately within his lens and the final shot. Thompson aims always only to use natural light, and this seems to create human presence within the material world, a world that presents as cinematic and multi-dimensional. Consider the divine dalliance within his image of architect Vincent Van Duysen’s staircase in Antwerp, a statement of both flirtation and seduction. And again, in his image of a cone-shaped window in a private home in Scotland, both inside and out, juxtaposing interior comfort and the natural world beyond. Thompson’ s creative spirit drives him to place his own hand-made objects into his images. ‘I sometimes construct
"I SOMETIMES CONSTRUCT OBJECTS THAT APPEAR IN MY PICTURES. BUILDING THE ENVIRONMENT IS WHAT INTERESTS ME MOST. TAKING THE PHOTOGRAPH IS THE END PIECE."
MARTYN THOMPSONS INTERIOR CINEMA
(or deconstruct) objects that appear in my pictures. Building the environment is what interests me most. Taking the photograph is the end piece.’ This often ironic displacement of objects is a quintessential element within Thompson’s work. This perfected practice and penchant for still life extends each images beyond the usual recording of shape and design. There is more going on here, as in the work Dining Room, Howard and Liddie Harrison, UK. Is the table about to be set or is the dinner party over? Nothing is as it seems and yet all is as it is or could be. Breaking down preconceived visual perceptions is Thompson’s strength- objects and colour counterpoised in light and darker spaces, demanding immediate attention but then a deeper reflection. Juxtaposed with such pared-down elegance is Curtain, Anna Sui, New York, an image redolent with rich-red sensuality framing a curtain of floating gossamer light and intrigue, awakening the viewer to a realisation of imagined possibilities. The reward for the viewer from these photographs is a strong desire to return again and again to each image, a
desire to be part of these spaces. It can seem that Thompson excels when less is clearly more, when the result is dependent upon a creative imagination. These images display exciting, inviting and liveable spaces which the viewer feels drawn into rather than alienated from, sometimes offering possibilities for a smaller budget in turn dependent upon retro and found objects. Martyn Thompson began his creative career in fashion design and production in the heady days of Darlinghurst in the 1980s. His first photographs were of his two sisters who he dressed up for the camera. In 1983 he opened a shop called OX in Taylor Square with some friends and fellow designers including Leona Edmiston and Peter Morrissey. But by the nineties he was working in high fashion in locations abroad for numerous magazine shoots. He often set his fashion shoots in interior spaces which would lead him into a career in photography and design which he ultimately found more interesting and challenging. As a small child in London in the sixties, Thompson was unusually privileged to be allowed to play with English
ceramic designer doyenne Susie Cooper’s tea set that belonged to Thompson’s grandmother. Ms Cooper was Martyn’s great aunt. Without breaking any of the pieces Martyn would instinctively rearrange the cups and saucers, ‘mismatching’ the colours and patterns to see the effects. Certainly it is colour that pervades his highly original work which keeps him in such demand. It is colour that drives the elements of texture and perspective, colour that gives depth and meaning to photographs disporting desire and inviting consideration for comfort in our surroundings at work and at home. It is colour in his hands that lies rich and potent with past and recent memory. Of Australian magazines Thomson says: ‘They are much more amenable to my showing just a corner or part of a whole. In the US they nearly always require the bigger picture.’ It is his fragmentary views of interior spaces and the world around him that has sealed his success. It is after all how most of us see the world and the rooms through which we enter and exit every day at work and
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at home. His shots reverberate with contemporary cinematic experience. Thomson’s life is also richly informed by the sounds of music. His mother Shirley Thompson is a highly regard piano accompanist and teacher working in both England and Australia. Their musical tastes have differed widely. His youthful days at university and Darlinghurst in Sydney were filled with a longing to be a pop star. He has been a fan of Brian Eno’s ambient music since he was fourteen. Now, he is happy to admit that perhaps Eno is not that far removed from Ravel when one listens to Bolero. Thompson moved from London to New York twelve years ago. Here, while freelancing, he also continues his long and prestigious working association with renowned creative director/designer Ilse Crawford. He was first introduced to Crawford in the early 1990s in London where she was the highly influential editor of Elle Decoration. He was intimidated at first by her intellect but they fell into step almost immediately and have chalked up a long and lasting collaboration. In 1997 Rizzoli International published her text and his photographs titled The Sensual Home: Liberate Your Senses and Change Your Life. They teamed up again in 2005 with another Rizzoli edition titled ‘Home Is Where The Heart Is’. The essence of Crawford’s philosophy lies in her intelligent and engaging text in which she quotes from French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s 1958
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publication La Poetique de l’Espace: ‘Life begins well. It begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.’ As a starting point, if we are so lucky, perhaps our expectations are destined to be thwarted but it is a fine ideal. Monsieur Bachelard also tells us that: 'It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality'. Thompson has experienced both home ownership and rented accommodation. He currently rents a large loft space where he lives and works, and which he describes as not especially orderly. He believes that ownership brings a certain burden of responsibility. 'There is displacement of this responsibility when you rent a place which makes me feel more relaxed and casual about my environment - I try to always have this 'rental' sensibility where-ever I live'. Thompson and Crawford share similar sensibilities when it comes to design and photographinh enviable, contemporary interiors. His favourite colour is green indicating the wider realm of nature, which offers up every conceivable colour palette, tactile surface and substance. Ironically the colour green it seems is under threat for our ever-narrowing, long term survival. And Thompson's annual pilgrimage to family in Australia for Christmas has been spent over the last five years on the pristine south coast of New South Wales where wide skies and vast ocean fill their summer days. This photographer does not carry a camera around his neck when he is out
in his world. Instead he is an observer and his observance of colours is almost obsessive, he admits, and wonders aloud if it might not even be an annoyance to others as he invites them also to observe his constant enthusiasms. He believes that: 'Colour embraces people and the world around them, at least the world that embodies the eclecticism and theatricality of fashion and interior design'. His observations and connections with people and their shared world form his artist's visual notebook which continues intuitively to feed into his work. The wide world is Martyn Thompson's palette; his eyes are his lens and his brush. For now his home is in New York but perhaps it is a wise traveler through life who embraces Bachelard's words quoted aboce which reflect the human design for that dream house in which we will live happily ever after. Perhaps the dream in itself is alright but at the end of the day Bachelard tells us: 'For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts - serious, sad thoughts - and not to dreams.' • Jan Jones is a freelance lecturer in Western art history, writer and arts journalist.
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