New work on the opera Heart of Darkness by Tarik O'Regan to libretto and design by TP will be performed in Brooklyn and Princeton this November. This follows an earlier performance of an extract in August at the Royal Academy as part of a programme of 11 world premières based on texts by TP.

Heart of Darkness is being written as an opera in one act for 8 singers and 13 instruments. These events will feature scenes from Heart of Darkness, in addition to a panel discussion with O’ Regan and TP. Scenes will be performed with singers and piano accompaniment, led by AOP Artistic Director Steven Osgood.

3rd November performance at American Opera Projects, 138 South Oxford Street, Brooklyn.

www.operaprojects.org

4th November performance 8pm Wolfensohn Hall, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

This event is free and open to the public, but tickets must be requested in advance.

An exhibition of recent pastel works can be seen at the Flowers Central gallery, 21 Cork Street, London W1. More details and a selection from the show can be found at the Flowers website 

TP's lithograph of Samuel Beckett joins him at Princeton this autumn. TP is a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study whilst the litho is included in an exhibition at the Princeton University Library to mark the acquisition of the Leonard L. Milberg ‘53 Collection of Irish Theater. The exhibition features approximately 220 items from the collection, including first and significant editions of the playwrights’ published scripts, broadsides, manuscripts, playbills and posters. The exhibition, Players & Painted Stage: The Leonard L. Milberg Collection of Irish Theater, opens Friday, 13 October 2006, and will remain on view in both the Main and Milberg Galleries of Firestone Library through 22 April 2007.

the night porter said...

i went today to the university library to see the
exhibition.my image of beckett stares [so to speak since we are looking at the back of his head] at you as you come in.but itis not the lithograph but a poster version of it done by the national portrait gallery.perfectly ok though and flatteringly placed.also in the same show is
the folio society version of waiting for godot. bewileringly this id open at the same image. i wish they had shown the cover which of all the bookjackets ive done is my favourite.

Filmed earlier this month at his London studio TP is interviewed by Alan Yentob for the BBC documentary Imagine. Made to coincide with the first major exhibition of Diego Velazquez's work at the National Gallery, Imagine presents a portrait of the artist regarded by many as the greatest painter of all time. Alan Yentob travels to Seville, Madrid, Rome and New York tracing Velasquez's footsteps and meeting artists and critics who add more to the story.

Velazquez, The Painter's Painter

Screening BBC1 Tue 24 Oct, 10:35 pm - 11:25 pm, 50 mins

Rima's Song, comic book collage, 2005

Fifty years ago I sold (for £12) my first picture to a proper collection, that of the JCR of Pembroke College,  Oxford. This was a watercolour called The City. Last month this same Junior Common Room made a second purchase, slightly smaller for a slightly higher price. In their now splendidly hung gallery these two works, though separated in time by half a century hang merely inches apart.

My present self remembers painting The City as an undergraduate in my Walton Crescent lodgings but my past self could not have imagined making Rima's Song... and would probably not have been able to identify it as mine, or even to have 'understood' it.

The City, 1958, gouache.

Rima has quite a role in fiction. She is not only the jungle girl of W. H. Hudson's Green Mansions but the heroine of H. W. K. Collam's Come Autumn Hand, from which came the idea of my largest drawing, Rima's Wall. Her name is also, by nice coincidence, an anagram of Irma, the femme fatale of A Human Document (and hence A Humument). I was more than delighted, rummaging in a New York vintage comics store, to come across her again, once more a jungle goddess in tales like Safari of Death from Rima a short lived DC comics series from the seventies, brilliantly drawn by the enviably named Filipino artist Nestor Redondo.

Rima's Wall, 1991-2, pastel, h220cms x w1150cms

The Rima in Collam's story is less exotic, and cherishes an album of esoteric postcards. Using material from the DC comics I echoed them in a series of postcard-sized collages. Rima's Song is one of these, and one of my many attempts to convey the look and feel of music by means of an abstract notation; a song without words or specified tones. All the tiny fragments that make up this miniature metascore come from Redondo's harmonious colours and fine-tuned marks.

I was very impressed when the young committee members lighted upon this small and unassuming piece. To be truthful I was almost dismayed since it is a favourite thing I had half intended to keep. But it has found a good home not far from the Ashmolean which contains quite a comprehensive collection of my drawings, and the Bodleian which houses my archive. Fifty years ago the committee's predecessors chose the best thing on offer and their present members have more or less done it again. Artists be warned: if the Pembroke people come knocking at your door, they have very sharp eyes.