Jim Carrey, actor, comedian (and now painter) gave a red-carpet interview this week which was labelled “weird” and “awkward”. Among other things he said that the fashion event he was attending was “meaningless”, a statement of the obvious, some might say. He then went on to talk as if [...]

Oh the splendidness of astrology. I was listening to that Jacob Rees-Mogg, a 48-year-old elderly schoolboy who may actually become the next leader of the British Conservative Party. He is a caricature of “posh”, with the faux self-deprecating, smooth-bumbling of an Etonian (super polite and [...]

A little easy listening for summer. This melancholy song with its beautiful lyrics has been covered many times. I didn’t know it was initially a German tune — Der Sommerwind — which Johnny Mercer heard and translated into English. I’ve been listening to many versions on YouTube. Here are my [...]

In Hans Christian Andersen’s story  The Snow Queen, a little boy called Kay has tiny shards of an evil, distorting mirror lodged in his heart and in his eye. “…a mirror with the power of causing all that was good and beautiful when it was reflected therein, to look poor and mean; but that [...]

If you look at old manuscripts, or the doors of cathedrals, or stained glass or indeed most representations of the sign Cancer before the Renaissance, you won’t always be looking at a roundish, cosy old crab. Sometimes Cancer is a crayfish, sometimes an odd beetley thing, sometimes who knows?! [...]

It’s true the world around us is in upheaval. We are in a time of transition, with all the dangers, obstacles and dramas which that entails. And astrologically on this Solstice we can expect the collective emotional temperature to be turned up to boiling point — (with Mars and the Sun in [...]

“It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture.” — Cy Twombly Cy Twombly’s work is unmistakable: giant scribbles, smudges, words and phrases crash together across vast stretches of white. They look as if they’ve been made in an instant, a flash, a dash, a moment of possession — [...]

In the early spring of 1970, jazz fans were only talking about one album — a rich, textured blast of sound played with freestyle mastery and driven by an enormous rhythm section. Miles Davis, the prince of cool, had plugged in and gone electric. Not only was Davis’ use of electrical [...]

“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” Shepherd, naturalist, philosopher, traveller, mountaineer, writer, defender of the wild, environmental activist and immigrant, John Muir  through his passion and [...]

Last year, we featured  a series of musicians born during the month of Pisces — one for each day, but there were just too many to fit in. Here is Adam Levine, another for our sweet-sounding Pisces male voice choir, that includes James Taylor, Chris Martin, Nat King Cole, George Harrison, Tom [...]

Today, Mars, the planet of physicality, action and Iron John moves into the sign of the Bull. Strangely, this is traditionally considered a difficult position for the planet of masculinity — maybe there’s just too much testosterone there. However, I note that people with this placement natally [...]

The late Alexander McQueen said that he wanted people to feel afraid of the women who wore his clothes. His shows were legendary: shocking, emotional, Gothic, visceral — absolutely exquisite. In 1995’s The Birds — inspired by Hithcock’s movie — models stumbled down the catwalk, dresses torn [...]

Tom Chaplin, of the British band Keane, sings with all the tortured melancholy you’d expect from a fish-boy with Sun squaring Neptune, the planet of music. That Neptune is in Sagittarius, the sign of excess, so it also comes as no surprise that Chaplin has had his share of drug problems. One [...]

“Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.” Willem de Kooning, April 1946 How Willem de Kooning worked made an impression on visitors. He would sit for hours contemplating a painting and then pick up a brush and attack it intensely and decisively. “The ‘Women’ had to [...]

I’ll be giving a talk to the Birmingham Astrological Association on Saturday, March 4. It’s about Neptune in Pisces and art. For directions and more info, click here.

Last year, The Oxford Astrologer published a post on a musician every day during the month of the fishes — that most musical of signs. In case you missed it — or would like to do it all over again. Here is the list and links for the first week… Many, many musicians were born […]

So versatile, so clear, so direct: there’s no one like Nancy Wilson. I love her easy listening albums from the late 1960s/early 1970s (which included some of the best interpretations of Latin American music in English). They sparkle. Her voice is so pure and powerful, but it’s her ability to [...]

Continuing the series on artists with Venus in Aries. The picture tells the story really. Anish Kapoor has Venus at 0° Aries — the Ur degree, the alpha … the very beginning of the whole Zodiac. And well, is here is a great big Mons Venus in Aries own colour. Kapoor loves red. It’s nice that he [...]

Venus, the planet of love and art, harmony and sweetness, spends a long time in Aries, a sign that represents some quite contrary energies, in 2017. So we have an opportunity to look and think about how Venus behaves here. I’ve been looking at the charts of artists, fashion designers and film [...]