Monthly Archives: June 2014

Catherine Goodman (16)

I’ve at last come face-to-face with my portrait.   It is (of course) much better than in reproduction and also better in combination with the gallery of other sitters, where it is quite clear that they are effective and successful  interpretations of character, based, as was mine, on ties of friendship and a long process of observation and record:

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I hang next door to Hannah Rothschild who I regard as my companion-at-arms through the process because she took as long and was nearly as difficult to complete:

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Whitechapel Road

In walking to the local post office under the absurd delusion that there might still be a collection on Sunday, I noticed how well the façades of the Whitechapel Road look now that they have been cleaned up under an HLF scheme, dating back from when the road was planned to be Olympic boulevard.   It reveals some of the history of the east end:

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Veronese

We finally made it to the Veronese exhibition yesterday on the penultimate day before it closes:  a wonderful and nicely judged collection of paintings, demonstrating Veronese’s brilliant ability to create massed compositions, rich in visual incident, for the Venetian aristocracy in their villas and estates.   Full of small children, horses, dogs, spectators on distant balconies and beautifully painted fabric (but badly painted hands), many of the paintings are owned by the National Gallery itself, thanks to Charles Eastlake’s autumn shopping trips to northern Italy, armed with government money, when he was able to extract pictures from the impoverished Italian nobility.   Whilst many artists benefit from seeing their work en masse, I wasn’t convinced that this was true for Veronese.   Seeing them all together makes one realise the extent to which he replicates the same compositional formulae, using a wardrobe of cloaks and robes which reappear in different pictures.

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Rome (3)

The last great treat of my all-too-brief stay in Rome was crossing the Tiber to Trastevere to see the Villa Farnesina.   I had been once before and been disappointed by Peruzzi’s architecture and the fact that it is neither quite a palace, nor a properly suburban villa.   But this time, we arrived early, had it to ourselves, and the eyes of two painters helped me appreciate the incredible richness and variety of the wall paintings, not just Raphael’s, but his pupils and followers and workshop, decorating room after room:  the permeability with the garden, the free enjoyment of classical mythology, the enjoyment and observation of the natural world, birds, flowers and animals.   This was presumably all part of the make-belief ruralism of Agostino Chigi and his banking friends, contemporary with Giorgione and more than a century before Claude.   We started with Raphael’s Galatea:

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We liked the junctions with the fictive hangings below:

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Rome (2)

My second post from Rome has disappeared obstinately into the digital ether, so what follows is an attempt to reconstruct it.

We spent the latter part of the morning exploring S. Clemente, a wonderful church, built in the era of the Emperor Constantine on top of a Mithraic temple which survives in the deep basement.   We arrived first in the courtyard:

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Admired the Byzantine mosaic in the apse:

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Rome (1)

I arrived in Rome on a humid summer night to see the President’s exhibition of his classical sculpture and two much more loosely painted and allusive works which I had not seen before (it doesn’t really come out in the photograph):

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The exhibition was held jointly with Enzo Cucchi and afterwards we repaired to the roof terrace of a hotel on the Via Giulia, where the moon shone.   I had forgotten how beautiful Rome is.   The baroque churches:

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Stonehenge

Some time ago I was asked over the breakfast table if I’d like to visit Stonehenge at dawn.   Of course, I accepted.   So it was that I found myself drinking claret in the Holiday Inn in Solstice Park, part of the horrible detritus which has accumulated beside the A30 on the other side of the roundabout from Stonehenge.   In the morning, we were driven to the new visitor centre designed by Australian architects, Denton Corker and Marshall, a clever piece of unobtrusive design more than a mile away from Stonehenge itself:

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We were then taken to admire the full landscape with its barrows and the so-called cursus, no doubt invisible in the photograph:

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Sir Richard MacCormac (1)

I have just been to the launch of a book that Richard MacCormac (RA) has produced about the house he has lived in in Heneage Street, Spitalfields, and, more importantly, the house next door where Jocasta Innes, his partner for the last three decades, lived.   It’s called Two Houses in Spitalfields.   She bought no.5, which had been built for a brewer, in the late 1970s.   Her daughter, Tabitha, evoked the heroic days of Spitalfields preservation, when their house had few amenities but electric light, Brick Lane had only curry houses, and much of the area was faced by demolition.   The neighbours met one another in a nearby pub and Richard’s house could apparently be reached from Jocasta’s via a secret door made out of a fireplace.   Jocasta died in April 2013.   Her house is now up for sale.   The book is a photographic record.

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Catherine Goodman (15)

The first sight of my portrait is by j-peg.   Catherine has sent me a digital image to inspect.   What’s the verdict ?  First off, it’s a bit of a shock.   She said my brow had been getting higher and higher.   But the Mekon ?  Then I remember that the sitter is the least good judge of a portrait, being familiar only with the image in the mirror in the morning and photographs, which always lie.   It’s as much an interpretation of character as it is a strict likeness.   It’s good on the physicality of a head, its three-dimensionality.   Besides, it’s quite wrong to judge it without seeing it.   The verdict at home is that it’s particularly good on the eyes and eyebrows:

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Pipes in the Peaks

The highlight of the festival was an evening at the local garage.   I had been to it in the morning to try and buy a paper.   Nothing had indicated that it contained a huge array of mechanical organs, including one called Pipes in the Peaks which had originally been installed in the ABC cinema in Derby and was acquired by the garage in 1999:

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