L' Herault Art is proud to announce that we have taken on 4 regular contributors to the site since starting.

These individuals will be with us in many area of Art and Culture and will be part of the editorial team.

Georgina  Sparks

“Art is a Wicked Thing. It is what We Are.” (Georgia O’Keefe, 1887-1986)

Born in 1961 in San Bernardino County, that melting pot of sexual deviancy and strong family values otherwise known as the Mormon corridor, Georgina was raised in a trailer park outside Barstow by her father, who was possibly her uncle or possibly both. Sadly she never knew her mother, which Georgina describes as the catalyst which propelled her from a very young age to explore that sometimes indefinable boundary between fantasy and reality. Her subsequent discovery of a shelf dedicated to the biographies of radical and spirited women like Isadora Duncan and Isabelle Eberhardt in her local library filled Georgina’s imagination with the seductive promise of a life beyond Mecca Mobile Home Park.

A self-appointed loner, possessed at times by an almost frenzied energy, Georgina studied day and night, securing a scholarship to Stony Brook University, NY where she majored in English Literature. Five years later she completed her Master of Arts at Columbia University, South Carolina. She turned down the opportunity of a PhD, preferring instead to leave student life behind, where, over the course of her education, she had developed an increasing disdain towards academia which she considered in the most part to lack the intellectual vigour and daring that she craved.  

She spent the following seventeen years in New York where she worked as a freelance writer for small arts magazines devoted to exploring the fringes of cultural and artistic expression. The mild and often incongruous passivity of her articles were laced with the most unexpected acerbic thrusts, a style which won her a small, devoted group of followers, leading to two nominations for The New York Press Journalism Awards in 1992 and ’97 respectively.  

In late 2002, disheartened by the change of mood in the social and political landscape of New York, post 9/11, Georgina left America and moved to France. Since settling in Languedoc she has concentrated her energies on her own writing, whilst devoting the rest of her time to exploring the many galleries and cultural centres in and around the region.   

PENELOPE WARD

L.A. is pleased to introduce a new contributor to our Arts coverage.

Penelope Ward was born in Wimbledon, England forty-two years ago.

Privately educated for the first six years of her school life until her stockbroker father lost everything in a failed stock market venture in Ghana, Penelope then attended a number of state schools brilliantly winning a scholarship to study art history at Durham University.

Later she was given a Fulbright scholarship to study at Harvard University for one year. Here, she met her ex husband who became an investment banker on Wall Street

After divorcing Penny has lived in Berlin, Hong Kong and Fairbanks, Alaska.   

Penny now spends her time living in Montpellier and Islington in London and she has a small apartment in each city.

She travels extensively to see the great Artworks throughout the world and has spent extended time in Florence, Moscow and Amsterdam. 

Her hobbies and interests include collecting Victorian dolls, the life of Vivien Leigh and the impact of  a free market economy in Russia. 

Penelope will be recommending exhibitions farther afield and offering no holds reviews on current exhibitions in the area.

DYLAN JOYCE

DYLAN JOYCE was born in 1953 in Amroth Castle, which is near Tenby in South West Wales. The Castle itself allegedly was the rendezvous abode where Lord Horatio Nelson secretly met his mistress the actress Lady Emma Hamilton. It was long accepted and believed, even by Dylan himself, that he was the love child of a Miss Susanna Parsons and the artist Augustus John. However, years later, when  DNA testing had developed it was revealed that John was not his father after all. In fact his biological father turned out to be an Irish horse breeder who was murdered mistakenly by an I.R.A. terrorist in 1973. Dylan never met his father and the full story was only revealed in the journals of his mother which he read following her death from breast cancer.

 As a young man Dylan had been awarded a place on the Fine Art course at Reading University. However, he left after two years becoming disillusioned with the institution .The Department, it seemed to him, had abandoned all the basic principals of art education. Students were not encouraged to draw or even acknowledge the traditions of fine art at all.  When he left the University he had various occupations but eventually settled  on becoming an antique dealer, when he opened a small shop on the Portobello Road in London’s Notting Hill Gate. During this period he continued to paint and he retained his interest in the arts generally. He did  in fact  receive numerous awards and accolades for his work which is in many public and private collections both in Europe and America. Over the years he wrote frequent  reviews for the magazine Time Out  and occasionally for The Spectator.. Incredibly he was one of the first critics to recognise the talents and potential of  Damian Hirst and Tracy Emin, who since have both  acknowledged the encouragement he gave them when they were just out of art school. Dylan Joyce  eventually sold his antique business and moved to New York where he opened a very successful Art Gallery in Greenwich village. It was here that he also became a regular contributor to the magazine Rolling Stone. When his live-in partner was killed in the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers he decided to leave New York for good. He now lives in a small village near Pezanas where he rents a house with his son Michael. He remains actively involved in the creation of art and at present he is producing large prints which explore the concepts of evolution and chance. 

Jay G

Jay G was born on August 5th 1962 in Hexham, Northumberland to a Baptist preacher and a debutante who never settled away from Oxford.

Rumours of his birth being at the same time as the death of Marilynn Monroe have been exaggerated.

After studying theology in Oxford he disappeared for 12 years to live a nomadic existence surviving by becoming a photographic journalist in many hotspots of the world. His tagline of ‘What if’ was widely seen in Beirut, Iran and Grenada during turbulent times.

He became known for finding romance in the harshest of environments.

After an unsavoury event (documented) with a senior advisor to the Reagan administration Jay G became fascinated by the effects of art on the consciousness of society and wrote a number of books on the inflaming passion of Art in a class society.

A devout believer in romance and the beauty in all things Jay G continues to write and shoot anything that inspires passion and romance in his soul.

A chance meeting with Mario Testino inspired him to study other art forms and to believe that human nature and art are as natural an emotion as is salt and pepper.

When in a gallery in Switzerland he struck up a conversation with David Bowie and a move towards technology and the World Wide Web begun.

Jay G now contributes to 2 of the biggest selling blogs on the web and continues to search for the passion in all art forms but heavily focuses on the tie between romance and photography, dance, and fashion.

He has exhibited in the UK, Italy, Germany and the United States. His retrospective ‘Beauty in violent Times’ was his last exhibition in 2004.

Jay G moved to France in 2004 and lives near Montpellier with his film collection and beloved prints of the only woman in his life, Daisy Buchanan.

He changed his name by deed poll shortly before arriving.