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Reposted by Gavin Cologne-Brookes

Stardust 🌏🎬 @stardustbluepr.com · 17/08/2026

Hopping into Monday.. Kangaroos on the sea at sunrise. Australia 📹 jeroen.fritz on IG

Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Click on the link below to watch my conversation with Chris Braitch, for his Seen & Heard podcast, about the boarding experience in relation to my memoir, Portraits from Paris: School & Travel Remembered from the City of Light seenheard.org.uk/blog/seen-an...

seenheard.org.uk

Seen and Heard Podcast - Episode 59 - Gavin Cologne-Brookes - Seen & Heard

Writer and painter Gavin Cologne-Brookes discusses boarding school, creativity, memory, healing, and his memoir Portraits from Paris.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

I've just been invited to begin writing another book. Thank you, Morning Sunshine. Your invitation is easy to accept.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

This portrait of Bruce Springsteen is on loan display in the Vere Harmsworth Library, Rothermere American Insitute, University of Oxford - @raioxford.bsky.social - alongside portraits of Arthur Miller, William Styron & Joyce Carol Oates.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

Intriguing to see joycecaroloates.bsky.social posting about Bruce Springsteen. When I began to write about links between them for American Lonesome, I wasn't sure about it, but a lot more connects them than their mutual admiration for Flannery O'Connor.

joycecaroloates.bsky.social

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

Enjoyable panel on memoir with Catharine Savage Brosman at the Louisiana Book Festival November 1.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

I took the Greyhound all over the US 1979-85 & occasionally up to 1995, so a roundtrip from New Orleans to Baton Rouge this past weekend was a dose of nostalgia.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

Bloody hell: best year ever for our garden apples. Branches touching the grass. . . "and there may be two or three / Apples that I didn't pick upon some bough. / But I am done with apple-picking now." Robert Frost.

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Reposted by Gavin Cologne-Brookes

BERGΛMΛX @bergamax.bsky.social · 30/08/2025

"The Cat Read the Emails First" (2025) acrylic painting By Ukrainian artist Nataliya Bagatskaya - n.bagatska [IG] #art #painting #illustration #caturday

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

Joyce Carol Oates (2010). This oil portrait is based on how joycecaroloates.bsky.social was when we had an onstage conversation in Chicago as part of Story Week 2010. The painting is currently on display at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, @raioxford.bsky.social

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

Arthur Miller (2009). Standing outside his home in Roxbury, Connecticut in the summer 1990, he's holding a copy of his autobiography, Timebends. This oil portrait is currently on display at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

My portrait of painter, Richard Ewen, an American who settled in Wiltshire. I inherited his easel.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

I once knew someone who knew Fowles. I had a hardback of Daniel Martin & a friend with a son named Daniel Martin. Fowles signed the copy "to Daniel Martin."

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

@lsupress.bsky.social have included a monochrome reproduction of this painting, "Art Appreciation," in Portraits from Paris: School & Travel Remembered from the City of Light.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

Our cat, Socrates, died aged 21 in April. In youth he was a remarkable leaper. Later he was arthritic, deaf, and poor-sighted, but remained philosophical.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

"I wander & I find," writes Pessoa. "I find because I wander." I found him through Saramago & both accompany me on visits to Lisbon (Ch. 20 of Portraits from Paris @lsupress.bsky.social). The Book of Disquiet is a strangely relaxing read. "Life is an experimental journey that we make involuntarily."

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Bonjour Bluesky. I'm visiting locations featuring in Portraits from Paris: School & Travel Remembered from the City of Light (lsupress.bluesky.social 2025) - here the Tuileries & Musée d'Orsay. It's also about how 1970s boarding made me an oil painter. "Away to School" is reproduced in the book.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

"I lost my head and went straight to the cellar to look for my hat which was in the attic." François-René de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

The @lsupress.bsky.social virtual book launch for Portraits from Paris will take place on 26 June. Please see the LSU Press Facebook page for details.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Thank you to all who came to the PV of Paris Paintings on 6 March. The paintings are on display until 30 March.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Today was a blue sky autumn day in Wiltshire, threaded with gold.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Recalling an afternoon with Eugène Delacroix, reading his journal at his house in Place de Furstemburg, Saint-Germain-des-Prés. No one else was there, just the two of us.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Congratulations to my one-time colleague, & most ethereal of portraits, Samantha Harvey, winner of the Booker Prize for her wonderful novel, Orbital. For the portrait, I placed her in Sainte-Chapelle, which she described as her "favourite place in the world."

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

I'm near the end of Barry Walsh's brilliant second novel and will finish it after pommes à l'huile and a pression. It's a wonderfully evocative of 1960s Pimlico but the designers have done a fine job in blending the typeface of the novel's title with that of Brasserie Lipp.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Portraits of Arthur Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, Bruce Springsteen and William Styron in the Vere Harmsworth Library of the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. The Springsteen and Styron portraits feature on the covers of American Lonesome (2018) and Rereading William Styron (2014).

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

How a book began: in a faculty meeting in 1996 I doodled this first step toward Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates (LSU Press 2005). Perusing her papers at Syracuse University in 1997 I discovered that JCO is a prolific doodler, mostly of faces.

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Gavin Cologne-Brookes @cologneg.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

"Bruce Springsteen Plays the Petit Palais." In my semi-imagined Paris, this life-size portrait of the E Street Band hangs where, in the actual Petit Palais, you'll find Fernand Pelez's Les Saltimbanques (1818). Pelez's painting is a poignant portrait of a line of circus performers.

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