two exhibitions

Today's forecast was for showers in the afternoon and I'd been waiting for a wet day to take a break from gardening and catch a couple of exhibitions, so I went to the Dulwich Picture Gallery to see their show of Eric Ravilious watercolours, and the British Museum to catch Indigenous Australia before it ends this weekend.

I started with Ravilious, on the basis that it was best to begin at the furthest point and work backwards.  And I am a very big fan of Ravilious, while my curiosity about indigenous Australia is more of a polite curiosity, heavily based on Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines and a bonkers police thriller Mystery Road that we watched recently on DVD, neither of which should be regarded as an entirely reliable source.  The works at London Bridge mean that trains to north Dulwich are still suspended, and I sulked rather before the event about the faff of having to go round to Victoria to catch a train to west Dulwich instead.  In the event I was lucky with the Circle line and the Orpington train (though travellers at Victoria might have been surprised to see a grey haired woman in an egg yolk coloured raincoat sprinting quite so fast across the concourse) and west Dulwich station turned out to be a shorter walk to the gallery than the other (though not as picturesque because you don't see anything of Dulwich village).  Once London Bridge is finished I'll probably revert to my usual route.

The Ravilious exhibition was very, very good and rather crowded.  There was a queue to buy a ticket, and another to get into the exhibition, and I was glad I hadn't arranged for anybody else to come with me.  My former colleague who has decamped to south London and likes the Dulwich gallery has a low tolerance threshold for queues, of approximately thirty seconds.  The great British public likes Ravilious.  The show still has over a month to run, and the crowd was at about the upper limit of what is compatible with seeing and enjoying the pictures.  But it was worth it for Ravilious.  I love his palette, his obsession with rendering texture, the complex geometry of his interiors (he notices and includes ceilings), the general absence of figures, and the eerie, other worldly atmosphere of his work.  I like his choice of subject matter, coastal scenes, downland slopes, derelict machinery.  I am basically a total fan.

I like the Dulwich gallery too, other than not being impressed by their pop-up coffee shop, where a sole young woman struggled to keep up with the queue of people who just wanted a hot drink and a nibble rather than a restaurant lunch.  Fumblingly slow with anxiety lurking behind her polite smile, I don't think that her dreams of her future included dispensing tea made with not quite boiling water out of an urn in a small tent in Dulwich.  In her efforts to keep the queue moving she had failed to start a new jug of filter coffee until it almost ran out, so that my cardboard cup contained the last of the old coffee topped up with the first of the new after a couple of minutes' delay while it percolated.  The resulting brew was predictably lukewarm, also bitter, and if I weren't  hopelessly meek mannered and English I'd have demanded a fresh cup of something hot.

Indigenous Australia was small but interesting, and about as depressing as you'd expect the history of Australia's aboriginal people to be.  The skill and craftsmanship that must have gone into weaving such nets and baskets from plants and hair was quite wonderful.  Indeed, the exhibition finishes with a video of the last person making baskets by the traditional method.  Examples of his work are to be found in Australia's major museums.  In his day job he works at a recycling centre.  I liked the paintings, in fact, I'd have been happy to see more of them.  I know that they are full of symbolic meanings I can't read, and that I can't tell to what extent they've been modified to suit western tastes or churned out commercially, but I liked them anyway.  Though apart from being reminded that Australia is a large continent and that its indigenous population was not homogeneous, I'm not sure my grasp of Aboriginal culture is much greater now than it was after reading The Songlines and watching Mystery Road, other than that I now know that some tribes produced very beautiful two horned baskets.