I went to check on the robins after breakfast. The babies had their heads up, unlike yesterday afternoon when they were resting feebly on the rim of the nest, so they escaped heat stroke, this time. I call it a nest, but it is not a very good one, more an untidy heap of moss littered between two flowerpots, with a depression in the middle of it.
Then I went to London. I've been keeping today's date free since Christmas, so that I could go to a Gresham College free lecture. I've been meaning to go to one for two or three years without ever getting round to it, and noticed on their website that on 20 June the Provost was talking on the subject of making and running great gardens, addressed from an economic perspective, which sounded ideal.
The lecture wasn't until six, doors opening at half past five, but I thought I'd make a day of it and look at some galleries first, particularly since the forecast was for rain. Indeed, there were yellow Be Aware warnings of rain for Essex on the Met Office website, though when I got home I discovered all it had done was drizzle. Be Aware, Risk of Drizzle. Is Your Journey Strictly Necessary? I began with Tate Britain, so that I could walk back to Tate Modern and from there walk to Holborn for the lecture.
Tate Britain is showing Patrick Caulfield and Gary Hume as linked exhibitions. I went to see them in a spirit of enquiry, to broaden my horizons, challenge my preconceptions, and because as I've got Tate membership I might as well use it. From the reviews in the media I didn't expect to like them, and I'm afraid I didn't. I didn't hate them either, but was left dreadfully unmoved, which was rather what I expected. Patrick Caulfield painted large canvases, mostly of interior spaces, using a mixture of outline and blocks of bright colour to suggest and delineate objects and volumes. He mostly used acrylic, in big, flat stretches of uniform pigment with never a brush stroke in sight. Later in his career he started introducing odd items painted in a more representative, conventional style, which sit disconcertingly in the semi-abstract fields of flat colour. They are clever paintings in the way that they clearly depict objects and interiors with such economical use of line and limited palette. I just didn't like them, at an aesthetic or emotional level. I didn't like the colours, didn't warm to the slick outlines, didn't enjoy being so graphically reminded of the 1970s, which was an ugly decade in so many ways. It's on until the first of September, so you have plenty of time to go and see and judge for yourself.
Gary Hume paints on aluminium panels, in gloss paint, so his pictures are very shiny. Sometimes he uses enamel, even shinier. It is terribly reactionary to like brushwork and an ability to draw, but there you are, I do, and Gary Hume doesn't do drawing or brushwork. I couldn't understand why so many of my fellow gallery goers were standing so close to the pictures, when they were large, bright, and from two feet away you wouldn't be able to see the composition, while there were no interesting details in most of them to see. I should like someone to explain to me why a bright red square, moulded to look like a pair of barn doors, is a work of art, when my pot shed doors, hand crafted by the Systems Administrator and also painted bright red, are just doors, but I am hopelessly out of tune with modern art. Actually, I don't think the average dwell time in that exhibition was very long.
Then as I was there I went and looked at some of the rehung permanent collection, starting with Henry Moore and working backwards chronologically because I didn't like the look of what came next if I went forwards. I was delighted to find that Barbara Hepworth's Pelagos has made it back to Millbank, having been to Bankside and then disappeared off to St Ives. Also Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's Singer is now on display. In Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy I suddenly noticed the vase of lilies on the low table in the left hand foreground, for the fist time in approximately forty years. Did Hockney know that lily pollen is acutely toxic to cats, and does this carry a coded warning about the fragility of existence? Quite possibly not, which goes to show how difficult it is to know how much to read into things.
And the rest can wait until tomorrow, because it's late. Sleep well.
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