I lived at the Abbey Art Centre in New Barnet, Hertfordshire in the late 1960s and early 70s, first in a room in the main house ('Remember, no flibbertigibbets,' Ms. Ohly, the landlady, had told me), then a succession of studios in the garden. The communal meals featured in the video had disappeared, but there was still a certain community spirit. Mike Figgis was one resident, at that time involved with the People Show group, and Lotte Reinegger, the animated film pioneer was another. The place hadn't changed much since the early fifties, and I'm pretty sure the abstract painter in the video is working in my first 'garden' studio.  

If the video doesn't show up on this page, click here to view it.

Vladimir Nabokov:
"The seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle." 

​Here's a Matisse that does it for me (despite the cracks):

From an article in the New York Times (October 30, 2017) about the literary critic Franco Moretti and his "distant reading" - the computer-assisted crunching of thousands of texts at a time:
​
... even modest-seeming results — like the finding that from 1785 to 1900 the language of the British novel steadily shifted away from words relating to moral judgment to words associated with concrete description — unsettle established ideas of literary history.

Ted Underwood, a professor at the University of Illinois who also uses computational analysis, commented:

“We tend to see literary history as a story of movements, periods, sudden revolutions,” Mr. Underwood said. “There are also these really broad, slow, massive changes that we haven’t described before.”

Another way to think about the history of visual art, too.