I was only able to go briefly to the opening of Eileen Hogan’s exhibition at Browse and Darby tonight. I am familiar with some of the work, not least because her monumental paintings of beehives have been shown in the Summer Exhibition and in a previous exhibition at the Fleming Collection. What I was particularly impressed by, both this evening and seeing the work before, was the painting of clothes in her wardrobe, called Self-portrait through wardrobe, which are a hybrid between a meditation on the meaning of clothes, their associations, and pure painting of fabric and colour.
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Unilever House (4)
I was able for the first time to go onto the roof of Unilever House this morning (Unilever employees only). One gets a rather amazing view out across the city, down towards Tower Bridge, past the emerging Tate Modern behind NEO Bankside, the Rogers Stirk Harbour apartment buildings which have been shortlisted for the Stirling Prize. It’s just behind the curved yellow building which Piers Gough did for the Manhattan Loft Corporation in 1999:-
Greenwich Peninsula
We were asked to lunch on Greenwich Peninsula, not the most obvious place for lunch, but unexpectedly enjoyable, like visiting another country. We were originally going to have lunch in Craft, Tom Dixon’s new venture, where the food is said to be delicious, but it doesn’t open for lunch on Sunday, so we sat outside eating Lebanese food instead.
First, we enjoyed Farshid Moussavi’s Ravensbourne School of Art close up with its polyhedral tiling:-
East Bergholt
The last of my posts from Suffolk is of the organic food stall just by the church which had maize and dahlias. We bought all the dahlias:-
Stoke-by-Nayland
I have been assured that I have been to Stoke-by-Nayland before. I have no recollection of it. I feel sure that I would remember the two perfectly preserved Tudor houses which flank the road down to the church, like Robin’s Croft in Chilham:-
Long Melford Church
On the way to Flatford, we found ourselves unexpectedly in the vicinity of Long Melford and stopped off in search of family tombs (Savages not Smiths). I have been quite recently when staying in Clare, but still appreciated seeing, once again, the great wool church, stately at the top of the green:-
The south porch (Dowsing must have visited):-
Flatford Mill
We went this afternoon to Flatford Mill to see an exhibition of watercolour paintings by Charlotte Verity undertaken during a period of residency at Bridge Cottage which is where the work was shown. It is impossible not to see the countryside round about through the eyes of Constable as one comes down the hill out of East Bergholt and looks out across Dedham Vale to Dedham Church in the distance:-
Then, by the Mill itself, there are views of the lock and across the river of trees which are familiar:-
Daniel Marot
I’ve always been a touch sceptical of the widespread influence of Daniel Marot, the Huguenot designer, who left France for Holland and came to London to work at Hampton Court and Kensington Palace. But less so when one sees the set of panels which Ralph Montagu commissioned for Montagu House in Bloomsbury and which have been kept in store in the attics of Boughton:-
Boughton House (2)
It was cold and slightly bleak at Boughton where we went to see the Huguenot exhibition, but still wonderful as one comes out of the roads and villages of Northamptonshire into the secret grandeur of the estate with its great, architecturally cool, French house:-
Chris Wilkinson RA
Chris Wilkinson is not the sort of architect who one would necessarily expect to use drawing as intensively as he does as he belongs to a generation who view architecture as about technology and problem-solving as much as about pure design. But, it’s obvious from the small exhibition he’s just installed in the RA’s Tennant Gallery that he uses drawings at least as much for pleasure, sketching the characteristics of medieval buildings on holiday in Lucca and the view out of the window of his hotel room in New York, as he does for purposes of conception, design and presentation.
These are some details, arbitrarily selected:-
Magna in Rotherham which won the Stirling Prize:-
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