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BBC News
30-06-2025
- General
- BBC News
'I tend Surrealist painter's forgotten grave in Dorset'
For three years, an art lover has been tending the forgotten grave of a Surrealist painter after he discovered it overgrown and obscured by Hillier RA lies in the parish churchyard of Glanvilles Wootton in north Dorset but the reason he is buried there is his grave is regularly cleaned by journalist Seth Dellow, from Ilminster, Somerset, who has also tried to track down the artist's said he decided to care for the plot because he liked Surrealism and found it "weird and bizarre" that Hillier would be buried there. Hillier was a member of the Unit One modernist group of the 1930s, along with Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and founder Paul of his paintings were inspired by the landscapes of north Dorset and Somerset and, following his death in Bristol in 1983, he was buried at St Mary's in Glanvilles Wootton. Mr Dellow said when he found the gravestone it was "completely neglected, covered in lichen, the grass had completely overgrown it"."The lichen was very thick so I thought I'd start cleaning it up - that was a few years ago now," he Dellow contacted the parish clerk and churchwarden, hoping to track down the artist's family but without success."I think what really needs doing is the gold lettering," he said. "The weather has had an effect. It's starting to disappear and there's a risk that one day you won't be able to read what it says." Hillier was born in China, the son of a diplomat, but attended school in lived for more than two decades in France and served in the Royal Navy during World War Two before settling in East Pennard, 20 miles away from his final resting Dellow said: "He was painting rural scenes. You don't really get many British Surrealists who are painting those scenes, especially in Somerset and north Dorset."I don't know why he's buried here but he did paint parts of Dorset - in the area near Sherborne, Wincanton, and places like Cucklington, near the border."For some reason he was very attracted to those areas."I really like Surrealism as an art form. It was a time when Britain had just been to war and it was a difficult time for the country."It's just a surreal story to have a Surrealist from Somerset and Dorset buried here, that's what I find really weird and bizarre, but I love it." You can follow BBC Dorset on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
New Statesman
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Edward Burra's tour of the 20th century
John Deth (Hommage a Conrad Aiken) by Edward Burra, 1931 The art of Edward Burra is also the art of popping up in unlikely places. He was in the audience in Paris when Josephine Baker made her debut at La Revue Nègre in 1925 and in New York during the Harlem Renaissance; he visited Mexico with Malcolm Lowry and was in Spain as tensions bubbled towards the Civil War; he lived in coastal England during the Second World War witnessing troops departing – and sometimes returning – from the continent and captured the incursion of A-roads and pylons into the ancient landscapes of Cornwall and Wales in the early 1970s. If Burra was Zelig with a paintbrush he was also part of a strand of eccentric English art that, had its origins in William Blake and ran through Richard Dadd, Aubrey Beardsley, Percy Wyndham Lewis and Stanley Spencer. He may have joined Unit One, Paul Nash's short-lived avant-garde gathering of British artists, sculptors and architects, and exhibited alongside Picasso, Miró and Magritte at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, but he stood outside stylistic groupings. As he told one questioner: 'I didn't like being told what to think, dearie.' That hint of bloody-mindedness was also perhaps the result of lifelong ill health. Burra suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia and as a boy contracted both pneumonia and rheumatic fever: 'The only time I don't feel any pain,' he later wrote, 'is when I am working. I become completely unaware.' Physical discomfort was why he chose watercolour over oil paint for most of his work – bending over a sheet on a table was easier than standing at an easel. Burra was nevertheless a social creature; his friends included Anthony Powell and the choreographer Frederick Ashton as well as innumerable artists and flâneurs. He travelled widely in company, diving into both the glitter and the demi-monde of Paris, the cafés, sailor-filled dockside bars and clubs of Marseille and the dancehalls and striptease joints of Harlem, but lived and worked for most of his life at the well-appointed family home in Rye. There, as he painted, he would play the newest jazz bands from his capacious record collection. It was this mixture of circumstances and experience that resulted in some of the most distinctive art of the British 20th century. Burra's hard-to-categorise career is the subject of an immaculate and revealing new exhibition at Tate Britain. It shows a man whose art reflected a rare sense of engagement with his times, especially its queer fringes. The works of the 1920s and 1930s treat his experiences in France and New York and verge on both satire and caricature. Burra used watercolour almost as oil paint and built up layers to give unusual depth of colour and subtle gradations. It was a technique he employed in teeming images: tight-suited sailors at a bar ('Everyone was sailor mad,' said Ashton), burlesque reviews on stage and riotous Harlem ballrooms. Burra moved in a gay milieu and in such places he found a liberating sense of sexual freedom and cross-class slumming. The pictures are peopled with 'types', from heavy-on-the-make-up women and lascivious and sinister men to simple beefcakes and beauties. Some are white-eyed, as if the headiness of the bars and clubs were acting as a narcotic. It is as if Bruegel or Jan Steen had wandered from the Low Countries into seedier and more cacophonous climes. In these paintings he is the English equivalent of Otto Dix and George Grosz but without the bitter edge. If the Germans showed the inequality of the postwar years – fat and seedy plutocrats made rich by profiteering contrasted with mutilated army veterans – Burra was more interested in communities, whether dancers, musicians or trufflers after sex – licit or illicit. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Burra's style and subject matter changed with the onset of the Spanish Civil War. He travelled to Spain in 1933 in search of an Iberian version of Harlem, a place of music and dance and, while he found flamenco and colour, he also found burgeoning violence. Unlike so many other British artists and writers, however, he was no Republican sympathiser. His own politics were ambiguous at best, and in 1942 he told John Rothenstein, director of the Tate Gallery, that he was pro-Franco, although this may have been mere provocation. In fact, he seems to have disliked both fascists and communists equally. The paintings he started to make were larger – multiple sheets glued together – and stuffed with rippling and bulbous figures, cloaked and faceless figures among ruins. These were characters of some indeterminate medieval past rather than modern-day combatants, with the sinister mood of Goya's Los Caprichos etchings and the atrocities depicted in his Disasters of War prints transposed into a present that was nevertheless timeless. Indeed the melons-in-a-sack nature of his figures, where shoulders, buttocks and calves bulge alarmingly, are more akin to the Mannerist frescoes of Giulio Romano for the Palazzo del Te in Mantua from the 1530s than anything Burra's contemporaries were producing. The Estate Of Edward Burra, Courtesy Lefevre Fine Art, London / Bridgeman Images What war in Spain and then across Europe awoke in him was a generalised disgust at violence and destruction. Witnessing the soldiers massing at Rye to fight across the Channel unnerved him. Even as they climb into a troop lorry in Soldiers' Backs (1942) there is malignity in their movement, and when he painted Soldiers at Rye (1941), showing a troop dozing, he gave them beaked plague masks that make the men both theatrical and menacing. In 1945 he described to a friend (in prose that was as idiosyncratic as his pictures) the feelings the times released in him: 'The very sight of peoples faces sickens me I've got no pity it really is terrible sometimes ime quite frightened at myself I think such awful things I get in such paroxysms of impotent venom I feel it must poison the atmosphere.' The cartoonist and author Osbert Lancaster astutely observed that, 'What Burra is trying to do… is not to select and record some single aspect of the modern tragedy… but to digest it whole and transform it into something of permanent aesthetic significance'. Nevertheless, Burra's impotent venom stayed with him. Sometimes he found release from it in designing costumes and theatre sets for Carmen and Don Quixote for the Royal Opera House and Sadler's Wells, but it remained lurking. From the late 1930s into the 1970s Burra also painted rural scenes, spurred by a new interest in gardening and by the car trips he took around Britain. Some are pure landscapes, such as a bewitching view of clouded hilltops, Near Whitby, Yorkshire (1972), and some introduce folklore into real views, such as Landscape with Birdman Piper and Fisherwoman (1946). In others, however, he took aim at the encroachment of modernity: a man at a petrol station is enveloped in the coils of his fuel pipe that has turned into a snake, a stream of cars and lorries invades the countryside like an army, and in Skeleton Party (1952-54) a cluster of ghouls, fresh from Mexico's Día de los Muertos, make merry in an industrial landscape. Burra once responded to a question about his art by stating: 'I never tell anyone anything… I don't see that it matters.' He didn't need to: it seems clear that that joyous Harlem jazz had turned into a danse macabre. Edward Burra Tate Britain, London SW1 Until 19 October [See also: Jarvis Cocker at 61: Is this hardcore?] Related
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Constellation ahead of schedule for Clean Energy Center launch
DAUPHIN COUNTY, Pa. (WHTM) — Constellation announced it is ahead of schedule leading up to the launch of the new Crane Clean Energy Center. Constellation, one of the world's leaders in energy production, announced a purchase agreement with Microsoft to restart the Three Mile Island Unit One reactor and launch the Crane Clean Energy Center just five months ago. Today, the company announced it is ahead of schedule on various key workstreams, including hiring, naming, equipment inspections, building upgrades, and permitting and hiring of the nuclear plant restart. Constellation president and CEO Joe Dominguez said early milestones indicate the center will be returned to service 'better than ever.' 'Every new milestone confirms our belief that the Crane Clean Energy Center can bereturned to service better than ever, restoring 835 megawatts of carbon-free energy tothe regional grid at a critical time for Pennsylvania and our nation,' said Dominguez. 'Major maintenance and upgrades are proceeding ahead of plan, new equipment has been ordered, and we are making tremendous progress on hiring and training the next generation of skilled workers to operate the plant at world-class levels of safety and performance, just as before.' Since the initial announcement of the restart, 200 full-time employees have been hired, and dozens more have been recruited to fill additional key roles, Constellation said. The company said it plans to hire 600 employees leading up to the restart, with the next wave of openings being posted in March. Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now The company added that it restored and enhanced its training center and control room simulator to accommodate new hires. A Londonderry Township Board of Supervisors member added that the surrounding community is seeing a positive impact due to recent hires. 'With only a few hundred workers on site, local restaurants and businesses are alreadyfeeling a significant boost,' said Bart Shellenhamer, Member, Londonderry TownshipBoard of Supervisors. 'We look forward to welcoming new families to the area andleveraging the many benefits that the restart will bring.' Inspections, upgrades, new equipment purchases, and a $35 million investment have been made to help ensure a safe restart, Constellation said. Car crashes into York County resident's home; Driver hospitalized Constellation also announced it has been working to obtain all the licensing and permits required by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is in charge of approving the restart. Constellation said all of the regulatory filings can be found on the NRC's website. According to Constellation, it has donated $1 million over five years to the neighboring community to support workforce development and nonprofit organizations. 'We can't tell you how much it means to have the renewed support of Constellation,'said Angela Durantine, Program Director, Lower Dauphin Communities That Care. 'Sincethe Bookmobile is our largest expense, it's great to know that we have the funds to coverthose costs as well as being able to expand reading programs for area youth.' Constellation will participate in an NRC public meeting to provide an overview of its emergency plan later today, Feb. 19. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
