In the second day of the Garden Museum Literary Festival, Mary Keen gave a charming talk about her education as a gardener: reacting against her grandmother’s garden designed by Harold Peto; reading Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes; much influenced by painters, including Hogarth’s Line of Beauty, Samuel Palmer’s In a Shoreham Garden, Klimt and, most of all, Paul Nash; admiring Lutyens’s work at Lambay Island off the coast of Ireland and Lady Salisbury’s garden at Cranborne; introducing informality, stones as well as rough grasses and not too much planting, the picturesque aesthetic of the sharawadgi, to the gardens of the rich, as well as her own former garden in Duntisbourne Rous; and supporting the work of younger gardeners like Dan Pearson and Pip Morrison.

I forgot to say yesterday that we had lunch in the Garden Café, the ridiculously delicious café attached to, and indeed run by, the Garden Museum.   The orthodoxy is that museums cannot, and should not, run their own catering operations.   The Garden Museum transgresses this orthodoxy with style and profit (I am not going to pretend that it is cheap).   I have seldom had six such delicious starters – and ale – more than enough for three and a half of us to eat.

Alison Wilding’s 70th. birthday was celebrated last night with a spectacular display of fireworks bursting over Stepney Green:-

Rachel Whiteread gave a speech in which she reminisced about what Alison was like as a teacher at Brighton Polytechnic, her time as a studio assistant (unmentioned in the recent monograph about Alison’s work) and the importance of Alison’s solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1985, alongside another by Louise Bourgeois.

I am posting in her honour a photograph of the very beautiful small sculpture which we have on temporary loan:-

We spent most of the day of boiling heat at the Garden Museum, listening to speakers talk about urban gardens:  Allan Jenkins about the pleasures of going to his allotment in the early hours of the morning;  Luke Dixon about putting beehives into Princess Margaret’s garden at Kensington Palace;  Iain Sinclair on finding a mulberry tree planted by John Evelyn;  and Will Ashon on Epping Forest.

The Museum itself was a nice, cool mix of plants and tombs:-

In the discussion between Antony Gormley and Rowan Williams, and particularly their response to the occasional timidity of the church in its commissions, I thought of Leonard McComb’s Portrait of a Young Man Standing, which, as has been referred to in his obituaries, was created an an image of mankind at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, modelled on one of his students at the West of England School of Art in Bristol. In 1990, it was exhibited in Lincoln Cathedral as part of an exhibition called The Journey, but the then Dean was so upset by the statue’s nudity that he had its genitals covered in a skirt and then the sculpture was removed altogether from the nave. McComb was so upset that he decided that it should not be exhibited and it now belongs to the Tate.

I have just been to an event at the RA in which Antony Gormley talked to Rowan Williams and vice versa about the spiritual and aesthetic experience of art:  something which most artists and art historians are now wary of discussing; and most theologians don’t necessarily have the interest.   The discussion was centred round some of Gormley’s sculptures, beginning with his work Transport made from iron nails removed from the roof of Canterbury Cathedral and followed by his naked figures disappearing into the horizon on Crosbie Beach.   Then, they discussed the more abstract installations in Gormley’s current exhibition in Kettle’s Yard.   What was impressive was that both were willing to discuss the essential nature and unknowability of deep artistic experience, its abstract symbolism, even when, although seldom, entirely divorced from meaning.

We had the first Lloyd Dorfman Architecture Awards yesterday afternoon. The Benjamin West lecture theatre was used to good effect for presentations by five architectural practices from around the world: Go Hasegawa from Japan; Rahel Shawl from Ethiopia; Architectura Expandida from Colombia; Alireza Taghaboni from Iran; and Anne Holtrop, who was stuck on Eurostar, so his work was presented by someone else. They were admirably thoughtful presentations of work grappling with very different political and ideological circumstances. However beautiful and intelligent Go Hasegawa’s work was in its use of materials and stretching of small-scale architectural space, it could not quite match the impressive dignity with which Alireza Taghaboni presented the work he has designed in the difficult political circumstances of Iran. He was a deserving winner for the first year of these new architectural awards.

We went to the opening of the PRA’s exhibition at Lisson:  big, bold, free painting, with aspects of late Turner and Clyfford Still.

Siren (2016):-

Scene (2017):-

I was invited behind-the-scenes of Leighton House in advance of their HLF development scheme which will place all the offices and services in the adjacent 1920s Halsey Ricardo wing, thereby preserving the original Victorian interiors of the George Aitchison house, including the Arab Hall, intact:-

And the Winter Studio:-

I knew that G.F. Watts had lived next door in New Little Holland House (they used to chat about RA politics over the garden wall), but I didn’t know that New Little Holland House, designed by Frederick Pepys Cockerell, was demolished in 1964, Watts being regarded then as of so little public interest.

It’s not often that I walk across Green Park, but did so this evening at the height of this odd, hot summer and found that parts of it are now left unmown as a summer meadow, attractively unkempt:-