Paul Gough Livres

Stanley Spencer was one of Britain s greatest twentieth-century artists. He became famous for two things: his celebration and immortalisation of his home town of Cookham in Berkshire - his heaven on earth as he lovingly called it - and the fusion in his paintings of sex and religion, the heavenly and the ordinary. In 1915 Spencer left home to serve as a medical orderly in the Beaufort Military Hospital in Bristol. Aged 24, he had rarely stayed away overnight from home. For ten months he scrubbed floors, bandaged convalescent soldiers and carried supplies around the vast, former lunatic asylum. In 1916 he signed up for overseas duty in Macedonia, where he saw violent action up to the eve of the Armistice. Five years after the war, Spencer started making large drawings of a possible memorial scheme based on his wartime experiences. So extraordinary were his sketches, and so committed was he to realising them in paint, that the Behrend family became his patrons, funding a purpose-built memorial ch

In the summer of 2009 Bristol saw a remarkable phenomenon that made international news. An estimated 300,000 people queued for hours, often in pouring rain, for admission to the city's museum & art gallery. They had been attracted by the media hype surrounding an exhibition ambiguously entitled 'Banksy vs the Bristol Museum'. There have been many celebratory books about Banksy, but this is the first non-partisan documentation of the Bristol event and an attempt to assess its local and wider impact. ..The book raises a raft of questions: Is Banksy a subversive influence or merely a bit of fun? Why is Banksy so important to Bristol? Is he really important? Where does the exhibition leave Bristol as an epicentre of 'street art'? It looks at the setting up of the show and questions the need - other than to conform to the required Banksy mystique - for secrecy.

This new book will take the form of a collection of existing paintings, and others created specifically for this publication, each painting marking a walking line west from Newlyn along the headland to Land’s End, then north to Zennor. The images will be accompanied by a text written by Paul Gough. It will contextualise Paul Lewin’s practice in the history of Cornish painting, the tradition of en plein work, but will also offer a commentary on the artist’s sojourn across West Penwith. The book will also include an interview between the painter and writer which will cover the artist’s approach to painting, his methods, materials and those artists and writers who matter most to him.

Sir Stanley Spencer RA CBE worked at the Beaufort Military Hospital as a medical orderly during the First World War. He later served on the forgotten Macedonian Front with a field ambulance unit and an infantry regiment. He saw action, was traumatized and suffered acute bouts of malaria. Five years after the Armistice he started making numerous drawings recalling in great detail his war service. So impressed were two generous patrons, the Behrends, that they built a small chapel near Newbury to house a cycle of paintings. For five years Spencer toiled in the chapel. The resulting murals are quite extraordinary; they stand comparison with the great painted chapels of early Renaissance Italy. The Sandham Memorial Chapel ranks alongside the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and Britten's War Requiem, as one of the most moving monuments to 20th-century war. This book draws extensively on archive material to tell the complicated and often intense relationship between the architect, the patron and the painter. Told by leading academics and curators it offers a rich insight into one of the greatest war memorials in northern Europe.--Page 4 of cover.

Paul Gough examines the aftermath of the Great war and the impact of terrain militaria on contemporary British and Australian painters, photographers and writers.