Tag: galleries

Falling in love again!

John Hoyland – “Voyage to Now”

If I were to create a soundscape of me walking through most of the exhibitions we go to it would go something like this:

  • Hmm
  • OK? (rising note on the K)
  • Yes but
  • Why?
  • WTF?
  • Hmm

The silences are usually punctuated by the sound of shoes on wooden floors and the rustle of prayer books, or should I say catalogues? Darkened rooms and silent introspection could suggest some sort of meditative process going on but (aside from the Rothko room in the Tate) it seems more often to occupy the empty space between two coffees.

Yesterday we went to the Royal West of England Academy with our friends Tony and Glen to see a couple of shows which were untypically given space to breathe. Madame was especially taken by some drawings by Denny Long. I wandered among some very late sculptural works by John Hoyland which seemed to me to be 3D maquettes for paintings. Then Madame disappeared for a minute and came back through the glass door of a darkened room which I’d concluded led to nowhere in particular. “You’ve got to come and see this!”

The four of us have been friends for more than 50 years. We met on what might have been known as a happening back in the day, and nowadays – in the era of curators and gallerists who, like half assed bodhisattvas sacrifice their own meagre creative gifts to help the rest of us to understand stuff properly – would be known possibly as an intervention; you know – the kind of thing where a scouring pad is accompanied by a three page artist’s statement. When we get together we all too easily slip into geriatric misbehaviour. Yesterday we found a box of dressing up clothes in the gallery and felt obliged to try the tiaras out.

Me, Glen and Tony – photographed by Madame

One of the great benefits of being old is getting away with misbehaviour that would have you thrown out if you were thirty. Anyway, we went through the glass door into the darkened room and there it was; a large painting by John Hoyland called “Voyage to now”.

It’s very hard to describe what’s happening when you fall in love with a painting. I’ve seen John Hoyland’s work over the years and found it interesting, bright, colourful and all the other lukewarm adjectives you could apply to a painting. But this was very different. This one spoke, or rather sang! – and the song was full of joy as well as full of echoes. The first thought that came into my mind was of lying on a real Freudian style couch with my psychoanalytic psychotherapist, Robin, sitting silently behind me as I spoke and re-arranged the furniture in my house of memories. Robin was the master of silences which were never in the least hostile, but warm and safe silences that seemed to be saying “go on, don’t be scared”. Then came echoes of more paintings remembered from previous encounters. These resonances, of Van Gogh’s Starry Night; Samuel Palmer; the 20th century British ruralist movement; Paul Nash; Turner – the list of artists goes on; all of them lyrical.

I must have encountered the phrase “music of the spheres” when I was very young, and having no idea of its mathematical connotations I thought that if, at night, I listened intently enough I’d be able to hear it. I had unconsciously turned a theory into a physical manifestation. Many years later I discovered that this is what artists do; gifted ones at any rate. There’s no crime or failing in references and quotations. One of the great gifts of modernism was to set artists free from the doctrine of absolute hardcore originality. I’m thinking of poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and others like Basil Bunting. Full of quotations and remembrances of half sung ancient rhymes and mysteries. I’m thinking of musicians and weavers and potters. The untalented have their theories and then illustrate them, but the greatest artists think with their fingers and eyes and bring the intangible showings within their minds into plastic, tangible life. If any piece of art needs an artist’s statement to work, it’s a wrong’un!

And so I couldn’t tear myself away from this painting. I jokingly asked the attendant if he’d mind if I nicked it. I even offered him the £2 coin in my pocket if he’d just look away. He thought this was vastly amusing but said his lowest price was more than £2 – so I got Madame to take a photo instead, and now it’s in my head glowing with life and inspiring connections and thoughts as a fruiting fungus might shed spores.

Maybe, just maybe, this was just the beginning of the Chinese Year of the Dragon for me too. As we walked up to the Gallery we passed the most enormous queue outside the Museum. It snaked up the road and around the corner, some of its members in fancy dress – we saw at least one panda. In total around 4,500 people apparently went to celebrate the festival yesterday and they were by no means all Chinese. This year is said to be highly auspicious for births and standing in front of John Hoyland’s painting, being infused with its joyful light I could faintly understand what it was saying. Maybe I’d never really got Hoyland’s painting before because I just wasn’t ready. There’s an ancient Chinese proverb that goes like this:

To teach someone who is not ready is a waste of breath

not to teach someone who is ready is the waste of a person.

Maybe it was just my time.

Home again, home again, jiggety jig

IMG_5343It was always going to be a bit of an odd day divided into several parts, and things turned out pretty much as expected. The grandchildren came over for the morning and while I was up at the allotment strimming, Madame went with the Brigade of Mischief for a trip around Prior Park (a National Trust  property) after which we all met up at Uncle Jo’s pizza place for lunch, where they lined up to watch him turning their foraged ramsons into a garlic flavoured pizza. There, in a single photo, is the reason why we’re so driven to secure a future for them.  How could we hope to be remembered with any affection if we hand them the rags of a devastated environment?

So after lunch and some writing for me, we caught the bus to Bristol for the opening night of the exhibition. A couple of old friends from art school days celebrated their annversary by renting the Centre Space Gallery and inviting thirty of their artist friends to submit some work. It was a brilliant evening and the gallery was packed with people we either knew or wanted to get to know.  Names and faces were put together after decades of never getting around to meeting.  I guess if we’d met fifty years ago, someone would have got drunk, someone would have started a fight and someone would have rushed out in tears –  (actually I could have done any, or all of the three) – but now in our mature(ish) years there were fewer sharp edges and less easily bruised egos.

I continue to be obsessed with the way that age alters our faces but leaves us somehow the same, and so I have to be careful not to stare (almost forensically) at people who find it disturbing. It was hardly surprising, then, that my painting was a watercolour illustration of a purple sprouting broccoli leaf rescued from the compost heap and absolutely stunning in its decomposing colours of green, yellow and brown. Generally leaves don’t get offended by staring, but I’d love to find a model prepared to put up with it. One of the guests told me a story about failing to recognise one of his old models because he’d never seen her with clothes on.

We caught a late bus back –  an extraordinary experience because we almost never stay out late, especially in Bristol. And so the bus was absolutely rammed with as big a cross section of life as you could imagine.  There were chancers and inebriates of every age, edgy looking teenagers trying to look cool and one club bouncer who pulled his hi-viz jacket over his head and tried to sleep.  There was a dog that barked randomly at those who failed an unspoken test, a freemason in pinstripes with his regalia in a leather case, and a couple of young women conducting a mobile phone feud with an unknown recipient. Someone smelt pretty bad and so the windows were opened to let cold air in, and someone with nowhere to go was going nowhere in particular, eating his supper out of a rucksack.  We spend so much time in our own isolated lives it’s a proper shock to be nose to nose with complete strangers in a noisy bus – we should do it more often.

Anyway, part two of the party today with a meal together in Bristol and then tomorrow hand-to-hand combat with a BT engineer, and then bliss.  A couple of weeks with no commitments except the allotment and possibly a short trip to Wales.