France Etc

I don’t seem to be very good at keeping up with writing this at the moment…and now have far too much to write in a ten minute lunch break. Will try harder…

We spent two fantastic weeks in September/October in France, firstly in the Ardeche and secondly in a friend’s House in Marseillan.

The highlight of the first week was canoeing down the Ardeche River through it’s wonderful gorge, camping en route. After a day’s paddling in some of the best scenery in France, what better than to make a fire, cook a couple of steaks on it and wash it down with a bottle of red wine (miraculously having survived the journey) and some Talisker, smuggled into France in the hunter’s flask. We capsised fire minutes after getting into the boat the next day.

The second week involved lots of lazing about on a roof terrace reading, listening to music, eating cheese, drinking wine and playing Scrabble. This was punctuated by long walks along the beach, and blissfully lonely swims in the Med. Strange how books and music shape a holiday. Listened mainly to Joni Mitchell’s Blue and read Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers – both genuine masterpieces, the latter in particular shooting up my list of all time great works. Marseillan is one of the Oyster capitals of Europe and you can pick up a dozen for about 3 quid. Ate Oysters every day for a week; could I justify emigrating to the south of France based on the price of Les Huitres? No, but only because I’d miss English beer too much.

Last month I went the CAMRA beer festival in Oxford town hall. Absolutely worth going, if only to taste Hobsons Mild for the first time (CAMRA Supreme Champion Beer 2007). Wonderful flavours: quite malty and biscuity and with a nice bitterness. Haven’t seen it anywhere since. I’ve been into the Eagle and Child in Oxford quite a lot recently. It’s a pub I didn’t frequent as a student, but it’s just round the corner from where I work. Quite a good little pub (albeit with a misjudged conservatory style extension mercifully hidden at the back.) It’s where CS Lewis and Tolkien used to drink. They keep a good pint of London Pride, always seem to have Deuchars IPA (which I tend not to fancy after Summer) and I’ve recently been won over by Brakspear Bitter.

Listening:

Martin Simpson: Prodical Son  (Blew me away. Best album of the year.)

Davey Graham: Folk, Blues and Beyond (And have been since September. Why did nobody tell me about  this when I was eighteen. )

Joni Mitchell: Blue (See above)

Ralph Vaughan Williams – The Lark Ascending

JS Bach – Watchet Auf

Schubert – Winterreise

Reading:

Anthony Burgess: Earthly Powers (Genius. Read it.)

Iris Murdoch: The Sea, The Sea (In progress; not sold on it yet.)

Richard Dawkins: Climbing Mount Improbable and The Ancestors Tale

Alan Bennett: Writing Home and Untold Stories (Dipping in and out. Brilliant, obvioulsy.)

Viewing:

Mark Demsteader, Manchester artist, Oxford Inspires gallery (hit and miss, but a couple worth seeing.)

Joe’s Palace, BBC1 – The excellent Poliakoff at his best. Michael Gambon superb.

Prosperine, Freud and Turner

I headed out to Tate Britain on Saturday to see the new Turner exhibition. I got off at Westminster and was rained upon very heavily near parliament. By the time I got to Millbank I wasn’t really in the mood for it any more. Nevertheless I persevered, and am glad I did so. The Turner exhibition is very good indeed. Turner is not an artist who has ever particularly excited me. I think his oil paintings are awe-inspiring – a painting like The Fighting Temeraire , for example, thoroughly deserves its vast hordes of admirers – but they don’t make me want to seek out everything by him and read everything about him. But these watercolours, and in particular the colour studies (he called them ‘beginnings’) chosen by David Hockney, are fantastic. Turner was obsessed by colour and light (the interactive section of the exhibition explains this well) and the beginnings strip away everything else, leaving what I suppose Turner saw as colour ‘ideas’. Some of them are hauntingly beautiful, like the ghosts of his finished watercolours.

Anyway, after a relatively fleeting tour of the rest of the exhibition, I headed for Prosperine. Back in 2003 there was a Rossetti exhibition in Liverpool’s Walker art gallery. I was writing my MA thesis on Oscar Wilde at the time, and reading a lot about the Pre-Raphaeilites. The exhibition was a revelation, and I have loved Rossetti ever since. The Walker was, I seem to remember, widely praised at the time, and most of his great works were on display; Prosperine, however, wasn’t there. I knew from books that Prosperine was a gorgeous painting, but it’s not until you stand in front of it, or rather her, that you realise how astonishing a work it is. Eveyone talks about pre-raphaelite hair and lips, but look at her hands; Rossetti, was by this point, becoming obsessed with hands.

The model for Prosperine is Jane Morris (nee Burden), wife of William Morris. It’s not entirely clear whether she was Rossetti’s mistress, but she was certainly his muse. She was by no means conventionally beautiful, but she so inspired Rossetti that one can only imagine how mesmeric she must have been.

If you haven’t done so, I’d urge you to pay her a visit.

I’d not seen the new (well, newish) BP British Art Displays, and there is an excellent display in room 25 with some Lucien Freud and Stanley Spencer nudes. It seems a shame that there is not more Freud on display in London. I was lucky to catch the 2004 exhibition at the Wallace collection before I moved down here, but didn’t see the 2002 Tate exhibition. I hope there is another one soon, because as enjoyable as flicking through Freud in books is, it hardly does the works justice.

Martin Rowson on good form:

Anthony Gormley’s Another Place – Crosby

I still can’t make up my mind whether this is a good idea or not. I was totally overwhelmed by the installation on the day that I took this photo last year, but at the time I presumed it would be a temporary thing. I hadn’t really been following the discussion about it, but speaking to people back in Liverpool, it seems there was a lot of protest about it. If you haven’t seen it I urge you to do so.