10am to 3.00pm Village Hall, Church Road, Wickham Bishops, CM8 3JZ

Programme for the Day

10.00                Registration and Coffee

10.30 - 11.30    Session 1 - How to read great churches

11.30 - 11.45    Break

11.45 - 12.45    Session 2 - A Paradise garden: the hidden meaning of medieval

                         flowers

12.45 - 14.00    Lunch

14.00 - 15.00.   Session 3 - The nature of the beast: understanding fabulous

                         animals in medieval art

Cost £40 per Blackwater Arts Society member/other Arts Society member

 £45 for guests

Includes morning refreshments, a light lunch & glass of wine.

TO BOOK - PLEASE CONTACT JANET WATSON BELOW BEFORE BOOKING AS THIS DAY OF SPECIAL INTEREST IS ALMOST AT FULL CAPACITY.

email:  jiwatson0309@gmail.com with details as below:-

Please reserve ....... places at the Day of Special Interest on Monday 9 March 2026

Name ..................................................    email ...................................................

Tel No .................................................    Blackwater Arts Society member:

 Blackwater Arts Society member:  Yes   No

 Other Arts Society ....................................

Address if not a Blackwater Arts Society Member:

Bank Transfer:  The Arts Society Blackwater, CAF Bank

Sort Code 40-52-40      Account number 00060437

(Please put your name and DOSI as a reference)

Payment can also be made at The Arts Society Blackwater lectures on 8 January or 5 February 2026 using the Society's card machine - no cash or cheques please.

A Paradise Garden: The Art of Medieval Natural Symbols / How to read great churches

Our churches and cathedrals are packed with symbols that make much better sense if you understand the meanings and associations behind them. An author of five monographs on cathedrals, the speaker presents a guide to how to see through medieval eyes, using manuscripts and paintings to emphasise the world-view that saw order and meaning expressed through the colours, numbers, shapes and behaviour of plants and animals. Once you see the logic of the language, there's no going back!

 The Nature of the Beast: Understanding Fabulous Animals in Medieval Art

Medieval bestiaries are wondrously colourful worlds, blending fact with fiction, morality with mythology. They represent an understanding of the physical world, but also fulfilled the need for symbolic creatures to supplement biblical stories, offering a wide array of noble or crude behaviours with which to compare ourselves. What happened if you chased a bonnacon? What was a beaver's superpower? What did owls mean? And how did animals graduate from bestiaries into the realm of heraldry? In the course of an hour, we'll explore all these and more.

 A Paradise Garden: The Art of Medieval Natural Symbols

Our churches and cathedrals are packed with symbols that make much better sense if you understand the meanings and associations behind them. An author of five monographs on cathedrals, the speaker presents a guide to how to see through medieval eyes, using manuscripts and paintings to emphasise the world-view that saw order and meaning expressed through the colours, numbers, shapes and behaviour of plants and animals. Once you see the logic of the language, there's no going back!

 Dr Jonathan Foyle is a career communicator, best known for presenting TV series such as BBC2's Broadcast Award-winning 15-part 'Climbing Great Buildings', as well as contributing to Channel 4's 'Time Team' and Channel 5's 'Secrets of the Royal Palaces'. His former roles have encompassed Curator at Hampton Court and Chief Executive of World Monuments Fund Britain, writer for the FT Weekend, and he is now a lecturer at the University of Bath. Jonathan has authored seven volumes on great cathedrals and castles and has spoken across the world about discoveries in British arts. The offered Arts Society talks offer fresh and original analyses of personal fascinations in architecture and the arts and crafts, especially their all-important symbolism, through which we can better understand what their makers were trying to communicate- to anyone who holds the keys to deciphering. The aim of these talks is to share those keys, in friendship and with a sense of humour.

Lecture One: Art For Arts Sake:  Oscar Wilde & His Artistic Circle 

'The artist can express anything'. Oscar Wilde This lecture examines the early years of Oscar Wilde & his role within the Aesthetic Movement & his extraordinary rise to fame. As a self-styled 'Professor of Aesthetics’, he took America by storm, lecturing on the 'Decorative Arts' & using photography to create a cult of celebrity. In Paris, he encountered the Impressionists & then returned to London where he rubbed shoulders with Whistler and Sargent on Tite Street, Chelsea & created the 'House Beautiful', all long before he achieved anything of literary note! 

Lecture Two: A Haaaand-baaaag? The ImportanceOf Being Oscar (& Ernest!)

In a second lecture, now that Oscar is 'famous for being famous', we look at Oscar’s great literary & theatrical successes, beginning with The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890 followed by 4 smash hit plays in 3 years.  We give special attention to his greatest play, The Importance of Being Earnest, one of the funniest, most performed and most frequently quoted plays in the English-speaking world. Described as ‘A Trivial Comedy for Serious People’, it was of its time and yet ahead of its time, satirising the shallowness and superficiality of upper-class Victorian society.  We explore some of the hidden elements which the audience then (and perhaps now) were not aware of and discover that for the author, this glittering triumph heralded the beginning of his own fatal final act… 

Lecture Three: Downfall: The Trials of Oscar Wilde. 

"All trials are trials for one's life" Oscar Wilde. This lecture examines how, when at the peak of his success, a fateful decision led to disaster for Oscar Wilde. We explore the queer underworld of naughty nineties London and how his passion resulted in him being at the centre of the most infamous series of trials of the 19th century. The finale resulted in prison, exile and his untimely death. We conclude with Oscar’s legacy and how he continues to influence and inspire us today.

Simon Whitehouse is a (recovering) actor, lecturer, presenter, Alexander Technique and voice teacher and award winning London Blue Badge guide. He has worked as a guide lecturer in house at Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Opera House, the BBC and the National Gallery guiding both public and private tours. He is on the faculty of Ithaca College and also lectures for the Blue Badge Guide training course on the performing arts and English literature. Simon’s specialisms and passions are theatre, literature, fashion and art history but whatever the subject, Simon will weave a wonderful story from it.

Click here for registration form.

Little Baddow Memorial Hall

Little Baddow

Chelmsford CM3 4TA

Cost £40 per person

Uzbekistan in the heart of Central Asia boasts glittering mosques, madrassahs and minarets in the Silk Road cities of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva. These contrast wonderfully with the brutalist Soviet buildings of Tashkent, Urgench and Nukus. This lecture is an overview of the country, and a primer for anyone thinking of visiting. We explore the Savitsky Museum in Nukus, with the second largest collection of Russian Avante Garde Art, collected at a time when these artistic styles were banned by the state. We explore the revival of Islamic miniature painting in Bukhara and the resurgence of handicrafts all over the country that ceased during the 1930s and the Soviet drive to make everything factory based.

Embroidered suzanis from Nurata, stunning ceramics from Rishton, and the production of silk and velvet in Margilan. Plus, what are the ways that tourism is helping and hindering the production of high-quality handicrafts?  

A CARPET RIDE TO KHIVA – EXPLORING THE REVIVAL OF 15TH CENTURY TIMURID CARPET DESIGNS FROM PERSIAN ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS

This is a narrative approach to the revival of 15th century carpets in Khiva, a desert oasis in Uzbekistan. Illuminations on vellum – containing the only surviving representations of textiles from this era – flourished, despite the Islamic prohibition on representative art – and are all we had left of Timurid Carpets until Chris Alexander’s workshop began to weave them to life again.  The lecture will examine the traditional role of carpet weaving and embroidery in the social lives of Central Asian women and how social and political influences led to the decline of textile production. How do the constraints of gender-inequality, corruption and the sourcing of natural dyes from neighbouring Afghanistan continue to challenge attempts at reviving the rich textile heritage of Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand?

BANNED: SAVITSKY AND THE SECRET HOARD OF AVANTE GARDE ART

Despite the flourishing of Russian Avante Garde Art during the first 30 years of the 20th Century, as Stalin rose to power, he banned all but Socialist Realist expressions of art. To own anything else was dangerous enough but to start collecting it was unthinkable. And yet this is what Igor Savitsky did. He travelled throughout the Soviet Union, buying, bribing and cajoling until he’d amassed the second largest collection of Russian Avante Garde art in the world. The State Museum of Karakalpakstan, situated near the south shores of the Aral Sea is now a Mecca for art lovers. It’s remote location in the desert oasis of Khorezm, meant that Savitsky was able to get away with such subversive activity, because even the authorities in Moscow were a little hazy as to where exactly Karakalpakstan was. Savitsky promoted Russian artists sent to Central Asia in exile and the works of the first Central Asian artists to paint their own people and landscapes.

Chris Aslan was born in Turkey (hence the name Aslan) and spent his childhood there and in war-torn Beirut. After school, Chris spent two years at sea before studying Media and journalism at Leicester University. He then moved to Khiva, a desert oasis in Uzbekistan, establishing a UNESCO workshop reviving fifteenth century carpet designs and embroideries, and becoming the largest non-government employer in town. He was kicked out as part of an anti-Western purge and took a year in Cambridge to write A Carpet Ride to Khiva. Chris then spent several years in the Pamirs mountains of Tajikistan, training yak herders to comb their yaks for their cashmere-like down. Next came a couple more years in Kyrgyzstan living in the world’s largest natural walnut forest and establishing a wood-carving workshop. Since then, Chris has studied and rowed at Oxford, and is now based in Cambridge, but with plans to move to North Cyprus. When he’s not lecturing for The Arts Society, he writes. His latest book, Unravelling the Silk Road, is published by Icon Books. Chris also takes tours to Central Asia, returning whenever he can, having left a large chunk of his heart out there.