The rest of the weekend passed quite quickly.
I wrote a report about Internet World and emailed it up to work. Well, it was
best done whilst the thing was fresh in my mind and I used some of the best
lines in this Journal.
Then Ross and I journeyed in to town to visit Tate Britain. We've discovered that we can get to the Jubilee Line extension at Canary Warf quite easily and from there it's a stress free journey through to Westminster. Quite how we'd manage without the DLR and Jubilee Line I'm not quite sure because Routemaster buses are a bitch to handle with a wheelchair.
We went to two exhibitions whilst we were there - Stanley Spencer and James Gillray.
I particularly wanted to go to the Spencer exhibition as I've heard lots about the artist and his visionary qualities and I'd never seen any of the religious works based round Cookham up close. The only Spencer's I'd ever seen for real were some of the middle period nudes which are stark and uncompromising in their acceptance of the corruptibility of flesh.
I was slightly disappointed. I still think that he's an incredible draughtsman and that there's a luminary and foolish quality to his work. But it all felt incredibly buttoned up.
There was another strange thing. One of the most affecting pieces of work (called The Scrapheap was of layers of rusting metal. The attention to the surface textures and the appreciation of the depth of colour to be found was truly astonishing. There was similar glory in the portrayal of inanimate surface in two companion pieces Burners and Welders, war-time pieces recording work in a Clydeside shipyard. This contrasted absolutely with the increasing mannequin qualities of the figures populating the paintings. It was like looking at a computer generated image where the inanimate can be rendered with an almost photographic precision whilst the animate always looks too precise and tubular. Yet Spencer can never have seen computer generated images.
More of a revelation were the social and political cartoons of James Gillray.
For a start, there were a lot of them on view. And they were very well displayed with context and connotations eloquently and succinctly encapsulated in the accompanying materials. I hadn't realised the range of his work. And again, like Spencer, the quality of draughtsmanship about the compositions was quite splendid.
But, of course, it was all incredibly reactionary in political terms. Most of the cartoons concerning the French Revolution lampooned the current government for being in cahoots with the Revolutionaries and almost inviting them to invade and take over England. Now there were such fears at the time and it's maybe too easy, with over 200 years of hindsight, to say how wrong those view were. However, I do wonder how today's political cartoonists will be judged in their views of the European Community and the Euro. Probably "Interesting work but wrong political view".
The journey home was fine. The house was welcoming. The garden is still coming on. I made a pot of coffee as a treat. Ross and I talked a little more about futures over the weekend. He's looking to a time when he'll live here too. It may be a year or two yet but at least I've now heard the intention. It'll be good when he lands here at last. I'm tired of travelling.