2 Audley Square
Mayfair, London W1K
UK
Established in 1994, THE COURSE offers exciting and innovative lectures in Art History, Literature, Music and Opera.
How can we know, before we ever go there, that a new place will exhilarate us? Painting, photography, fiction, travel-writing, and poetry can put us on the plane with expectations, and pictures in our minds, and of course we then match what they promise against the realities that await us. Afterwards, art and writing intensify what we found, show us sights we missed, clothing our memories of them in the aura of legend as they had our hopes, so we may wonder if they exist when we are not there. Exhilarating Places visits charismatic cultural centres of our world and others we have dreamed of and invented. They catch our eye and instantly deliver both real and imagined destinations in great art and writing.
North Cornwall
Alfred Wallis’s untutored genius in a quayside hut sparked a school of painting in St Ives, its coast already vibrant with primeval energy, the myths of Arthur and Tristan, and the literary albums of Hardy and Lawrence. Here nature’s spaces were made new by Nicholson, Hepworth, Berlin, Heron, Winter, Barns-Graham, Frost, Lanyon and the Hiltons while Lawrence, Mansfield, Woolf, Barker, Clemo, WS Graham, David Wright, Heath-Stubbs and Ridler sang of dream-like landscapes.