As summer approaches, I like walking home through the back streets. There are unexpected pieces of popular styling:
And even the Corbusian housing estates look surprisingly magnificent in the setting sun:
Tag Archives: England
Catherine Goodman (6)
My early morning walk to Flood Street made beautiful by the early morning sun. Peter Jones looking like a transatlantic liner:
The Royal Hospital looking, as indeed it was designed to be, like a French chateau:
King’s Place
Last night, Jeremy Dixon, who has been responsible for much of my musical education, invited us to a concert at King’s Place, the small and very beautiful concert hall which he designed for Peter Millican underneath the building which now houses the Guardian. Imogen Cooper was playing with a young cellist, Sonia Wieder-Atherton. It had a good atmosphere, partly because half the audience were friends of Jeremy, invited by email. The programme was Janacek, Beethoven, Webern, Shostokovitch and Rachmaninov.
Hackney Wick
Since I have been told that my blog is too highbrow, I should maybe record the fact that I have had lunch in a motorbike store in Hackney Wick following a trip to visit the Custom Built Bicycle Show in the Velodrome. I wanted to like the Velodrome, which is beautiful from the outside, but unexpectedly disappointing inside, cheap finishing, exceptionally poor disabled access and smelling of drains. So, we retreated in search of food in Hackney Wick where we discovered pancakes, burritos and Beavertown American pale ale (brewed in Hackney) for lunch.
Regent’s Canal
I’ve just walked to the London Library by way of the Regent’s Canal. It’s a long time that I’ve done the full stretch from Bow in the east to Regent’s Park in the west. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever done it except on a bicycle. It’s a pleasure to see London from the back view, as from a railway train, past Victoria Park, past Broadway Market, past the Towpath Cafe which was setting up for breakfast and the smarter gardens east of Duncan Terrace, up and over Islington by way of Chapel Street Market and down through some of Islington’s seedier estates to Dixon Jones’s King’s Place, which I’ve never seen from the canal, through the new developments north of King’s Cross, past Nick Grimshaw’s smart aluminium pods at the back of his Camden Town Sainsbury’s and the egg cups which are all that remains of Terry Farrell’s tv-am to the creamy Regency houses on the north side of Regent’s Park which have canal boats moored at the end of their gardens and the brilliant green of the canal-side as it goes through the zoo. Apart from a brief detour to pich up a map of Piedmont in Daunt’s in Marylebone High Street, it took the best part of three hours, ending with a cappuccino at the Royal Academy. I recommend it.
Catherine Goodman (5)
Another day, another sitting. I quite like the way the sessions drift between music, observation, occasional stretching and a lot of high class gossip. Yesterday I was given an enormous bowl of coffee and then made to sit dead still for two hours which is a form of Japanese torture. For some reason, we discussed my very brief and disastrously unsuccessful career as the opening bat for my prep school 1st. XI. I suppose it is inevitable that being painted engenders a degree of self reflection. Today was quieter and more reflective. We tried to remember the brilliance of Humphrey Ocean’s speech last night. As I sat, bits of it came back to me: the fact that he regarded himself, like Constable, as a flatearther and that Constable retained a strong affinity for the ground. He’s the only person I know who can speak intuitively entirely from the left side of the brain.
Catherine Goodman (4)
As Catherine’s exhibition at the NPG looms, my sittings have moved to early in the morning, although not quite as early as I used to sit for Leonard McComb. So, I find myself walking through Chelsea past Bram Stoker’s house in St. Leonard’s Terrace. I remember a cousin of mine saying that when they set up house in Chelsea in the early 1950s it was regarded as bohemian and scandalised her relations who expected them to live in Mayfair. Hard to imagine now as I pass the merchant bankers on their way to work. John Morton Morris is very pleased because my portrait is smaller than Sally Clarke’s. I don’t know how he knows because I haven’t seen either.
Christo
Have just been to a talk by Christo: not just a talk, but an event, performance and peroration. He spoke a bit about his life – actually not quite enough: born in Bulgaria, escaped from Prague, educated at the Academy of Fine Arts (as an artist or as an architect ?) in Vienna, moving to Paris and then to New York in 1964 where he has lived in the same tenement block ever since, using the small studio at the top of the building, doing all the work on his projects with his wife Jeanne Claude and without a big office of assistants. He showed images of many of his projects – the Valley Curtain in Colorado, the Running Fence in California, the wrapping of the Reichstag and of the Pont Neuf. It’s completely obvious that he likes the process and politics of the gestation at least as much as the finished result. What wasn’t entirely clear is how he uses the process of drawing which he does after the project has been conceived in order to support it financially. There was a quality of enthusiastic innocence about his presentation which has won over audiences internationally, including most recently in Abu Dhabi where he is building up community support for a project in the desert. So, the question nobody asked is why he’s never done anything in Britain: umbrellas in the Lake District ? wrapping the Royal Academy?
Winterreise
Sunday evening. We went to hear Jonas Kaufmann sing Winterreise in a concert performance at the Royal Opera House. I’ve been brought up on recordings of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing them and I got a frisson from hearing them sung so slowly, so quietly and with such extraordinary control, shiveringly not just because they are about winter, the graveyard and snow. At the end, the man behind me said ‘Would you give it a four or a five ?’. A funny comment as if it was a football match against Fischer-Dieskau.
Springtime in Stepney
Having just read an email about how beautiful it is in the Valley of the Kings, I am posting some photographs of how beautiful it is in the Mile End Road:
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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