art

I went to London today.  It was all arranged before I knew that Thursday was going to be wet, wet, wet, so instead of spending the day puzzling over how on earth my bargain flat pack hive floors are supposed to go together, I spent it looking at art and getting slightly damp.

I was meeting an old colleague for lunch near the Queen's Gallery, but ended up with time to spare beforehand, since I'd built in a margin for error with the trains and another for the tube and not needed either of them.  Wondering what I could usefully do in less than an hour near Green Park tube station I suddenly remembered a review I read in the Telegraph of Prunella Clough at the Osborne Samuel Gallery.  She was a postwar artist who painted industrial scenes in a muted palette, and I'd liked what I saw of her work on the Telegraph website.  I felt rather cheeky making my way into what was a selling exhibition just off Berkeley Square, when I knew I wasn't in any position to buy even a tiny drawing, but reasoned that if they didn't want art enthusiasts wandering in off the street they shouldn't have got themselves a puff in a national newspaper.  In fact it turned out to be very easy.  I'm sure that the girl on the desk clocked instantly that I wasn't a prospective customer, but I stood in respectful attitudes in front of the pictures, taking great care not to let my wet boots squeak on the nice wooden floor, and as I wasn't causing her any trouble she didn't bother me.  I liked Prunella Clough very much, in particular a small square picture of dockside cranes that already had a red sticker, and a bigger painting of a printer checking proofs that wasn't sold, but without looking at a price list I was sure that I couldn't have afforded either of them.

The Queen's Gallery is showing Painting Paradise, a mad, barely curated exhibition about gardens and art.  It is a vast subject, which needn't be a problem since Her Majesty has an exceedingly large collection to draw from, but there wouldn't have been room for all of it in the gallery, which is not very big.  So you get tapestries with pictures of gardens, plans of lost gardens from previous centuries, water colours of Edwardian herbaceous borders, a family picture of Henry VIII with the future King Edward and some surviving female relatives plus two tiny glimpses of garden in the background, plates painted with botanical art, Dutch flower paintings, Faberge vases of glass and crystal flowers, furniture inlaid with pictures of flowers, a Royal child's wheelbarrow and small rake...You get the idea.  It's good as long as you're happy to take each piece as it comes, and not worry about the lack of an overarching narrative.  The main thing I would have liked was contemporary views and plans of the historic gardens like Chatsworth, to show how what's there now maps on to what was there previously.

I parted company with my friend at the gates of the Royal Academy, and went in to see their exhibition of Richard Diebenkorn, a US postwar abstract impressionist who became figurative for a short while in the late 1950s then turned back to abstraction, this time with a different palette, a smoother paint surface and more straight lines.  I liked his early works the best.  In fact, I could happily have looked at them for hours and taken several of them home, if it had been a selling exhibition and I'd been rich.  I tried to work out whether, in spite of being abstract, they had a right way up or would have worked just as well lying on their sides or inverted, and suspected that they did have a visual centre of gravity, though I couldn't explain why.  He possessed great graphic skill, as amply demonstrated in the second room when he was going through his figurative period, but although you could argue that a five year old could have done the works in the first room, I don't think most five year olds could, any more than they could produce a Rothko.  If I were given a six foot square canvas and a generous allowance of paint I fear I could not produce my own Diebenkorn, any more than I could knock out a Constable.

I toyed with the idea of the Duke of Wellington at the National Portrait Gallery, but decided that I was damp and had seen as much art as I could enjoy in one day.  Queuing in the traffic coming home, near Colchester station, at six o'clock I saw one of the new park and ride buses heading out of the town centre to the park bit of the scheme.  It had one passenger on it.