Alexander McCall Smith sent me some of his poems earlier this year and this was how the envelope was addressed:
Alexander McCall Smith is aware of my fascination with Walter Scott’s “The Antiquary”, such that I even call my study the “Sanctum sanctorum”:
On Sunday we visited Arbroath which was once the “Antiquary’s Garden”:
Hospitalfield House was open as part of Doors Open Day.
Hospitalfield was the home of the artist Patrick Allan Fraser and his wife Elizabeth:
Hospitalfield House is a time capsule of the artisan Victorian and most wonderfully also of today: Patrick Allan Fraser and his wife had no children and they bequeathed Hospitalfield to be a centre for training in the Arts. It is lovely to consider that Hospitalfield has been home to new and emerging art for over a century:
In what follows I intend to intersperse images that I took at Hospitalfield with words that I collect/borrow/steal from those that I read. The quotes offer considerations on what art may “be”. In Waiting for the Last Bus, Richard Holloway remarked:
“The mind is its own place and does its own thing. In our time, it is being investigated by psychologists and neuroscientists, but artists have always been its best explorers”
Patrick Allan-Fraser of Hospitalfield, Arbroath, this mortuary chapel and mausoleum built as a memorial to his wife Elizabeth following her death in 1873.
I visited it with my wife Sian on Sunday 9th September 2018 as part of Doors Open Day Scotland.
It is an impossible building to describe in words, let alone any one word, however it seems to me to carry some of what I have come to consider as ‘Gothic’.
A whole Gothic world had come to grief:
To play this film please click here or on the image above.
The day before visiting, my daughter Rachel introduced me to Spotify, and on one of the songs on her playlists was ‘Fourth of July’ by Sufjan Stevens. This track somehow entered my mind as I walked through the doorway to Patrick Allan Fraser’s mausoleum.
We went on to visit Hospitalfield House, the Fraser family home (a clip is included in this film).
Hospitalfield House is a time capsule of the artisan Victorian and most wonderfully also of today: Patrick Allan Fraser and his wife had no children and they bequeathed Hospitalfield to be a centre for training in the Arts. It is lovely to consider that Hospitalfield has been home to new and emerging art for over a century.