Peter Campbell, who was born in Wellington in New Zealand in 1937 and died in London in 2011, designed the LRB and wrote more than three hundred pieces for the paper, including, from 2000, a regular gallery piece. He also did the cover illustrations from 1993 until his death: his last, a fox in the street outside his house, was painted only a few weeks earlier. Many of these covers, as well as some of his other illustrations and book designs, can be seen in the collection Artwork and at petercampbell.org.uk.
Mary-Kay Wilmers, who first worked with him on the Listener in the late 1960s, when he designed the books for such BBC series as Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, wrote about his capacious interests. When there wasn’t an exhibition he liked, he described what he saw around him: gasometers, plane trees, beaches (and untucked shirts), funfairs, the squares of Bloomsbury (where the LRB offices are), the timber-framed houses of Wellington. He was also interested in how things work, writing memorably about escalators. There were, as Wilmers wrote, ‘few aspects of the world that Peter didn’t wish to honour’.
Shopfitting and window-dressing are ephemeral arts that flourish on novelty; even merchants proud of their long histories and royal warrants want up to date selling spaces. Bootmakers and wine merchants in St James’s may play up antiquity and preserve battered shutters and ripe mahogany but they are the exception. The timeframe of architecture is longer than that of retailing, and...
Our hedge has gone. The new railings are up. Weeds have begun to cover the bare ground. A dandelion is already flowering. Its seeds will soon appear and be carried off by the wind. Very probably some will find bare earth and germinate. They will not be popular. ‘Not easy to eradicate, regrowth occurs from root fragments,’ the Pest and Weed Expert says.
Weeds follow the spade...
The meal is over. On the tablecloth there are corks, an orange, a few walnut shells, an empty glass and a coffee spoon. Those of us whose instinct is to see if we can somehow balance these objects, one on the other, are generally found to be annoying. Conversation falters. People wait for over ambitious configurations to collapse. Structural doodling is our way of playing at being engineers....
John White is famous for the drawings he made in the late 1580s which record aspects of the North American littoral: its geography, its inhabitants, their dress, customs and dwellings, and the birds, plants and animals found there. Seventy-five of White’s drawings, along with navigational instruments, maps, books and relics of 16th-century exploration are on show in A New World, an...
The work of the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto is celebrated in an exhibition of drawings, photographs, models and furniture, Alvar Aalto through the Eyes of Shigeru Ban, at the Barbican Art Gallery until 13 May.
Although he designed nothing in Britain, much in the exhibition feels familiar. Materials (brick, tile, wood) and informal layouts bring to mind postwar English housing and town...
Peter Campbell talks to Julian Bell about the things painters can and can’t do.
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