'The Glittering Prizes'

      Perhaps one or twice a year I have had enough.  I concede defeat.  A novel is put aside unfinished.  It is a sort of failure, there is a lingering thought that it just might get better, but sometimes one just cannot continue reading it.  It has become unbearable.

     Last month was one of those times.  The book in question: 'The Glittering Prizes', by Frederick Raphael, published in 1976.  On the Penguin paperback edition of the actor Tom Conti as the main character Adam Morris, from the BBC adaptation 0f 1976.  I mean I wanted to like it.  Being set in post-war Cambridge I thought it might offer some incite into University life.  It may well have, but I can't get over the unlikeable, irritating characters. (Perhaps that's the point, perhaps that's the way they're meant to be) Not only that, they are all of an amorphous lump without any discernable character.  The best part was Adam's friendship with his fellow undergrad Donald - a sort of anti-Brideshead Revisited - it really was affecting.  But then we were back to University life....

     I tried the BBC adaptation in the hope it might help, and some extent it did, but it was spoilt by Tom Conti's bizarrely 'mannered' performance.

March

March by John Clare (1793-1864)

March month of 'many weathers' wildly comes
In hail and snow and rain and threatning hums
And floods: while often at his cottage door
The shepherd stands to hear the distant roar
Loosd from the rushing mills and river locks
Wi thundering sound and over powering shocks
And headlong hurry thro the meadow brigs
Brushing the leaning sallows fingering twigs
In feathery foam and eddy hissing chase
Rolling a storm oertaken travellers pace
From bank to bank along the meadow leas
Spreading and shining like to little seas
While in the pale sunlight a watery brood
Of swopping white birds flock about the flood

Own work: San Pietro della Immagini

     Have sort of finished this, the façade of the Sardinian Romanesque church of San Pietro della Immagini - St Peter of the Images.  The images being a Deposition group of polychromatic sculptures that was once housed in the church.  St Peter's is situated in the small town of Bulzi. Not really that happy with it, but I can't honestly see a way forward.  

Turner and Constable

     Wednesday afternoon - during our trip to London - and I braved the miserable weather and headed off to Tate Britain on Millbank for the Turner & Constable exhibition.  It was very popular and some rooms quite crowded.  A very middle class crowd at that and too many interminable middle class conversations that would have been bearable if they happen to have been about the art. A little claustrophic at times, but not as crowded or unpleasant as the John Singer Sargent exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery back in 2015. That was downright dangerous.  Not to self: always go as early as possible.

     Anyway, back to Millbank.  This exhibition marks the 250th anniversary of the births of those two artistic titans of British art Turner (1775) and Constable (1776), and is rather like one of those exam questions 'compare and contrast the work of...'.  Each room contains an equal amount of both, and I (like everybody it seemed) zig-zagged between the two, though if it hadn't have been so crowded you could, I suppose, do one and then return to the start to do the other. Their work comes at the end of the 'Long 18th century', that 'long period of Whig Oligarchy', when the pace of change between Pastoral Britain and Industrial Britain began to pick up, and their art both consciously and unconsciously reflects this. And that's about it.  I've really run out of things to say, usually at an exhibition such as this I find something on which I can hang my hat.  But not this time.  The art was beautiful, the watercolours exquisite, and by the end of it I found I liked Constable a little more, and Turner a little less.  It was not however, at least when I was there, a place for contemplation.

     Finally, for a small confession.  I did not like all of the work on display.  I will go even further and say that there were some paintings I actively disliked, and thought were terrible.  In the penultimate room, which was dominated by vast canvasses, there were some absolute shockers.  There, I've said it.

    

     

     We ate at Le Pain Quotidien, Maison Berteaux, and Ta'mini and in the evenings at our perennial favourite Ciao Bella on Lambs Conduit St; Fushan on New Oxford St (I really liked the grilled aubergine); and Fig & Walnut on Marchmont St.  I also ate at the V&A and Tate Britain - the V&A was the better experience

     The real culinary discovery of this trip was, however, 'Aux Merveilleux De Fred' at St Pancras station. Founded by Frederic Vaucamps, this small chain of patisseries specialise in Northern French/Belgian delicacies such as Merveileux, Cramique and waffles.  We were very impressed.

February

 

February by John Clare (1793-1864)

The snow has left the cottage top;
The thatch moss grows in brighter green;
And eaves in quick succession drop,
Where grinning icicles have been,
Pit-patting with a pleasant noise
In tubs set by the cottage-door;
While ducks and geese, with happy joys,
Plunge in the yard-pond brimming o'er.
The sun peeps through the window-pane;
Which children mark with laughing eye,
And in the wet street steal again
To tell each other spring is nigh:
Then, as young hope the past recalls,
In playing groups they often draw,
To build beside the sunny walls
Their spring-time huts of sticks or straw.

Rainy Old London

      Wednesday in London, and it rained all day, at least it felt like it.  I cancelled my trip into the City to look at churches and went to the V&A instead.  For a couple of hours, wandering through that vast and labyrinthine building, I surfeited on the decorative arts.  Here are some images of what I saw and liked. (The first object is the Easby Cross, from Northumbria AD800-820.  The carving is remarkable.  I am put in mind of Byzantine Ivories.  The final image is a head of the Buddha from ancient Gandhara, stucco with traces of colour.  Top knot derived from Greek statues of Apollo.)

Joseph Wright of Derby: Out of the Shadows

     

     To London for a couple of days.  And very welcome it was. Gallery-going and shopping.

     On our first day we went to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square to see the exhibition 'Wright of Derby: From the Shadows'.  A small exhibition, but rather the eye-opener that caused me to refresh my interest in this most remarkable of painters.  I've known of, and to a certain extent admire, the work of Joseph Wright for years now, but it remained, to me at least, rather sunk in the general miasma of 18th century British art.  I knew some of his work, particularly 'An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump', 1768, and possibly his most famous work; 'An Iron Forge' of 1772; and his arresting 'Portrait of Brooke Boothby' of 1781.  The rest was terra incognita.

     Wright was born in the English East Midland city of Derby in 1734 and was trained in London. He worked in his home town, in Bath and in Liverpool, at various stages of his life. He is connected to both Romanticism and the British Enlightenment.  He was a friend of Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgewood and Joseph Arkwright, and has been called 'the first painter of the Industrial Revolution'. He was a fine portraitist and landscape painter, but we tend to think of him for his dramatic tenebrist paintings - Wright called them his 'Candlelight' paintings - which he painted from the 1760s onwards, of which 'An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump' is the finest, and most famous, example.  A nocturnal, often occluded, world.  Tenebrism, I should explain at this point, is an essentially Baroque technique, an extreme form of Chiaroscuro.  Coincidentally, the work of another, earlier, tenebrist, the enigmatic French painter Georges de La Tour was the subject of an almost concurrent exhibition in Paris, at the Musee Jacquemart Andre.

     Staged within a suitably darkened gallery space, this exhibition, which is on until May 10th before moving on to Derby, concentrates solely on that tenebrism.  The first to do so, apparently. 

     The paintings on display - they are all oils - are accompanied by a wall of mezzotints - quite the perfect media - of those paintings.  Which, I wonder, influenced the selection of the other?

     With the exception of one painting - The Earthstopper of 1773 - these are rather contained if not, at times, claustrophobic images. Perhaps the most extreme and strange - and virtuosic - is Two Boys fighting over a Bladder of 1770.  The bodies of the boys - one in complete and deep shadow - fill the canvas to the exclusion of all else except the bladder which is lit eerily enough from a hidden light source.  That hidden light source is a recurring motif in these works, and it used to great effect throughout.

     Although thought of as an Enlightenment painter. these paintings, in addition to their claustrophobia, have a rather intense dreamlike quality.  We are called to enter into a world of mystery and initiation - an initiation amongst other things into the worlds of craft, science and of alchemy.  A world too, of the Gothic.