A Bigger Picture


Got down for the second time this week to Piccadilly. First time was to St James Church, designed by Christopher Wren, in which William Blake was baptised and now hosts Alternatives, a Monday night lecture and talk series that spins off into workshops and many wonderful things. Mainly of an esoteric and new age slant. For me just going out on a Monday evening in London was a breakthrough. I usually can't take the noise, the crowds the stress of making my way through a thundering crowd and traffic. It just has felt too painful.

Friday night even though three friends had already dropped out of going to the Hockney show I decided to just bloody well go anyway. It was very amusing going to an exhibition in the evening. I left the house about 6pm so I would be going in the opposite direction of any remaining rush hour traffic. But in fact the tubes are just getting more packed as if the more you have running, the more people will be on them. I reached The Royal Academy, Burlington House just up the road from St James around 6.30 and joined a huge snakelike queue of people doubled up on itself several times like a huge colon in the courtyard of the illustrious Academy. It was originally started by Charles II                 Owned by Dukes of Devonshire in 1753 but had no need of it apparently as they had the massive Devonshire House further down the road. The only part that survives of this are the gates at Green Park and interestingly the old wine cellar is now the Green Park Underground Station. 


Burlington House is not only the home of The Royal Academy but also the Society of Antiquaries, The Linnaen Society, The Geological Society (that originally started as a dining club at the Freemason's Arms), The Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society of  Chemistry. The buildings are made out of Portland Stone from the Upper Jurassic period. So we have a lovely link there for the Geological Society.


Surprisingly the layout of the fountains in the Annenburg courtyard, in front of the academy on which we stood in the slowly moving queue, reflects the pattern of planets in relation to the stars at the birth of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the painter. This is otherwise knows as his astrological horoscope but I would imagine we are not supposed to mention astrology in the same breath as astronomy although they both aim to study stars, planets and their behaviour. I imagined the seventeenth century when this place was built, there would have been horses and carriages racketing on the cobblestones, braziers burning, men selling hot chestnuts and  hot potatoes, all sorts of bustle and activities going on, old soldiers begging, cripples asking for alms at the gates, women with babies asking for a penny or two and probably people trying to shew them away to keep the place looking noble and divine. I was surprised that buskers, performers, jugglers hadn't picked up on the work opportunity given by the huge queues for this show, we were after all sitting ducks as we waited to get in and would have been grateful of the entertainment. I am sure young bucks in earlier centuries might have lampooned famous artists, landed gentry, Lord this and that, to make jokes and entertain and provide satire. Where is that open satire anymore? All tidied away on TV in closed lounges everywhere, everything taken off the streets and sanitized, controlled,licensed and destroyed, sadly. I have a feeling that
the streets of London where a lot more entertaining and ribald than they are now in 2012.


We have special, cordoned off and controlled places in which entertainments happen. There is the Covent Garden Piazza, where the flower market used to be and Cockney flower sellers would yell and brawl and pick up their flowers to sell outside the Opera House close by and perhaps those flower sellers might chuck in the day job if a dapper young gent fancied a roll in the hay with a fresh faced flower seller and give more money than the honest day job provided in two weeks of hard toil, for a few moments of lascivious behaviour. I mean most married women know what that's all about, the lying back and thinking of England bit, forgive me if I'm wrong.


I have a long and detailed conversation with Professor Dr. Joost Vander Auwera from Belgium, or Flanders from whence derived the Flemish language and painters. I mention Bruges and Princenhof. He tells me that this was where the Duke of Burgundy used to live,  when Belgium or Flanders was under his rule. Belgium has a checkered history. He says that it came under the protection of the English at one time to protect it from France our traditional enemies. At this point I wished I'd got my recorder with me as this is just from memory and liable to inaccuracy.  They have a checkered history, I know nothing, he speaks four languages, English very fluently and has given lectures at the Society for Antiquaries to our upper right in the Burlington House Quadrangle. He has a nice friend with him who is very patient with his friend and myself as he can't understand much English. We entertain ourselves by conversing, a cheap and totally non technical activity not relying on paper, phones, devices, mobiles, nothing but our own voices and the words we remember. It is fascinating, we ramble through many subjects like a long hike in an interesting place. I ask and ask, he answers and answers, he loves to lecture and talk,  he has not too old but very portly in a grand and opulent kind of way like a good burgher of Bruges who likes very good food. He briefly describes the extremely high cuisine of Belgium, how the restaurants make everything they use and take ages and how expensive and good and special and fancy it is to go. He says nowhere but in England would an almost mile long queue occur, with people talking quietly, being extremely patient, no one pushing in, an all pervading atmosphere of gentility, all of us united by desire and curiosity to see our very own hero, who lives in our lifetime and not some artist or painter from the past. Of our lifetime, of our culture, of our times. And who happens to come across as a very down to earth Yorkshire man now returned to the land of his birth but whom I suspect still likes a few trips to the sun. Now living in Bridlington on the coast of the East Riding of Yorkshire having been born in Bradford to a radical working class family. I am so enraptured.


A young man joins in, dapper, contemporary, well spoken and well dressed. His father turns up from Shaftesbury, Somerset in a Country tweed jacket and a cap and talks in a posh, drink haddled voice, you know that kind of mellifluous alcoholicvoice that some people have like they are permanently in a state of drawling intoxication from whisky, slurring words, like Prince Charles and that somehow it is posh to sound like this. He does but his son, I notice, detaches himself a little, wants to seem street wise, one of the people.


Closer and closer, colder and colder, but getting warmer and warmer. The staircase is in view, I can see inside and still no impatient surges from the crowd, not Titanic this, we all wait our turn and all are served entry. At last we're in, bliss, it's warm I don't know what to do first. It is 9.30pm. I have till 12 midnight. Hordes of people linger and browse in the shop, tills are doing very good business, Hockney mugs, socks, aprons, books, bags, I pad cases, scarves, prints, cards, books, catalogues all selling like hot water bottles.


There is so much to take in. After the long meditation of the queue, the extraordinary focus that gave and the intense energy of the full moon I feel like I am almost hallucinating as I am overpowered by the colour, the nature, the trees, the humanity, the warmth of the work. I don't like all of it. At some points to me he seems to go crazy with a kind of surrealistic madness when he gets overwhelmed by hawthorn blossom and makes strange crazy objects in an almost alien landscape. He spends hours outside painting, drawing, filming, using charcoal, dozens of lovely watercolours, acrylics, small paintings, large huge monolithic ones, forests, roads, logs, a few from California, in a riotous celebration of the beauty of nature, all done harmoniously and nicely in a nice secure rectangle or portrait with a tasteful aesthetic and with a focus on drawing and objectivity and in that he finds his own added style and interpretation. Some are almost naive, with strange shapes and things that seem to be going out of control with minds of their own jumping around in the otherwise calm landscape.Everything wants to come to life, move, dance, grow and change.


This devotion to nature and the landscape and returning to the familiar places over and over again in some of the work is interesting as his Mother died recently and she gave a focus to his life and a point where he could return to in his life. Now he returns to the place nearby, the landscape becoming a friend and familiar as he sees it over and over again. Now that his Mother is gone. And he has come back and lives there. But of course he can't ever go back to when she was alive except in his mind. I feel that she was a very important and powerful, if hidden person in his life.


I think I even miss some of the work. I walk straight through the strange 'Sermon on the Mount' work which doesn't interest me at all.Why this sudden strange religious theme? I don't see the films he made with nine cameras mounted onto the front of his SUV. He mentions in the text of the catalogue that you can't always portray the entire tree, that our eyes see more than we can put on a canvas or in a photograph, that they are selective so he uses several cameras to capture a wider and A Bigger Picture. I think I may have missed some of the winter trees although I have a memory of them somewhere.


I am so high and turned on by these paintings, the whole experience being somewhat other worldly and very special that I don't realise that it is almost midnight. I have been queueing, looking at paintings and on my feet since six oclock. I took one rest in the largest gallery and there were 70 portrait shaped pictures about two and a half ft by about four. I kept staring at them. They were quite simplified. The woman next to me says they were all done on an I-pad. I am so astonished. I cannot believe her, I disagree and it takes me a full half hour and her giving me a detailed analysis before I can take it in and believe it.She has been before, this is her second visit, she is in almost as much of a daze as I am.


Once again I have to say only trust in what your own eyes tell you. Don't listen to what other people say, make up your own mind, look for yourself, respond with your own senses. I had several people who put me off this exhibition, several cancellations and let downs by a woman who then went with someone else and let me down again. Another said she wouldn't spend 13 quid on it. Another who said it had nothing for her. Again these people were all just playing their part and testing out my commitment or curiosity. I did honestly go because I wanted to know what all the fuss was about and see what people were talking about. Always the best way. I am not interested in the Damien Hirst at the Tate or the Lucian Freud for that matter but maybe the Turner. I feel my entire morale being has been given a lift and a pat on the head.