The Aardvark Blog

Shropshire Hills Art Week Exhibition well and truly open
5/06/2016

A very busy Private View ( or vernissage as our French cousins would call it) to this year's Aardvark Shropshire Hills Art Week Show Shropshire Boogie-Woogie. Lots of visitors, a good clutch of sales, and a generally joyous event. This would seem to be the year in which SHAW has really taken off, with nearly double the number of artists participating. Hats of to the participants and organisers for making this year's show such a success.

I have attached some photographs of what you can see at Aardvark, and other great shows can be found in Bishops Castle at Bank House, at the Discovery Centre in Craven Arms and elsewhere throughout the county.

Happy 75th birthday to the wonderful Argentine born pianist Martha Argerich who can be heard on Radio 3 this afternoon performing with Daniel Barenboim in a concert from Berlin in a programme that includes Bartok's Sonata for two pianos and percussion. Truly age is a state of mind. A thought that brings me back to our forthcoming exhibition 'An Actor's Life' about the life and career of my late step-father Martin Benson. The invitation for the exhibition shows Martin with Sean Connery in Goldfinger, but in truth Martin played thugs and baddies across hundreds of films and television shows.

The show will also include a recently discovered photograph of Martin as a cadet during his officer training. Whilst most of his fellow trainee officers would have come straight from public or grammar school, Martin had made his way there via a German Prisoner of War stockade from which he had escaped and having made his way through the German lines, had managed to get back to Dunkirk.

In any spare moments today I will be continuing to process some of the 900 Folio Society books we have recently bought. So much great literature and such little time!