New York at Christmas 2009

New York 21st to 27th December 2009

I didn’t start writing this blog until 26th December, the fourth day of our stay in New York. This was partly because we were so busy going round the sights, museums and theatres of the city that I seldom sat in front of the laptop we brought with us, but also because I still have the after-effects of that poets’-artists’-swine-flu that hit me before Christmas. Energy levels depleted, coughing levels highly enhanced, I’ve spent a lot of my time fighting for breath! But it hasn’t stopped me using what’s left of both breath and energy to enjoy everything here.

When we got here in the early afternoon of 21st December the sun was glittering off snow and glass as we inched our way into Manhattan in the hotel shuttle car. It was the day after a big blizzard that hit the city from the Midwest, where we heard that conditions were extreme. In New York the snow was amazingly picturesque and Christmassy. The snow-covered porches of the board-faced houses in Queens reminded me of “About a Boy” and other movies set here.

The sunny weather continued for the next three days. We went for a long walk on the morning of our first full day, through Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The snow was deep and the paths were very slippery – I fell flat on my back twice – but it was very pretty, with the skyscrapers fringing the park looking ethereal and transparent in the sun, the skating rink and frozen lake crowded with cheerful people and all the sculptures dotted among the trees.

We found the big sculpture of Alice in Wonderland which Dónall was keen to photograph though I found the depiction of Alice herself quite ugly (I thought she looked at least twenty-seven, not seven years old). We duly photographed the group and went on, finding a witch, Will Shakespeare and a horseman in bronze among other things.

 The horse-drawn carriages that line up outside the park gates were trotting through the park with picturesquely decorated coachwork and passengers snuggled under red blankets. We found a squirrel on a tree next to the park, which posed obligingly with nuts in its paws though we were not quick enough to get a photo of it.

The Met, on a street at the farther end of Central Park, was an amazing museum. We especially enjoyed the Oceanic section and the Egyptian sculpture.

The Rodin sculptures were fantastic too, including a copy of the Burgers of Calais. I didn’t have time to do any drawings, except when we were queuing for lunch near the Burgers (no pun intended!) and I did a sketch of part of that complex group sculpture using a pen-brush. The Modern Art section was packed with paintings and sculpures that have iconic status, too.

Found Gallagher’s Steak House just across the road from the hotel, on the first evening, and dined there, hugely and expensively – loved it and booked to eat there on Christmas Day too.

We wore ourselves out on the second full day, another brilliantly sunny one. We spent the day walking in Manhattan, admiring the Chrysler building,

with its art deco lobby and ceiling painting of modern marvels of the early twentieth century

 the gothic style churches of St Bartholomew (St Barts), St. Patrick and St Thomas

 

 

St Thomas was our favourite, with its beautiful carved reredos inside and its rows of saints outside on the facade. By 4pm we had a camera full of art deco detail from the Rockefeller Center. I thought the gold sculpture that was the most photographed was by no means a masterpiece but Donall photographed me in front of it anyway.

There were lots of other Egyptian and Deco inspired motifs over doors and windows that deserved and got our attention. The ephemeral Christmas decorations at the Rockefeller Centre were lovely, angels and stars made of what looked like woven willow branches sprayed silver-white.

Christmas Eve we devoted to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) which was just round the corner from our hotel. There we saw Orozco's huge whale skeleton installation, Mobile Matrix (I wrote a poem and made a drawing of it)

 and every European modern master I've ever seen in a book, it seemed.

 
and then at Radio City, also nearby, we went to a late afternoon performance of the Christmas Spectacular – it was brilliantly staged kitsch and we loved every moment of it. The chorus girls (Rockettes) were faultless, the three-D laser effects wonderful – we came out feeling that we’d definitely not avoided Christmas, and were glad of it.

Christmas Day was overcast and later wet. We had lunch at Gallagher’s and then went to the theatre – amazed that a performance was staged on 25th December of West Side Story, which I had never seen. (British theatres are normally closed on Sundays and never open on Christmas Day). We were right up “in the gods” and certainly walked off our lunch. The action was a little distant from us, but still very enjoyable. The lead male singer had a beautiful voice and the dancing was great too. We were less impressed by Maria, whose voice became a little harsh in top range, than by the second female lead, Anita.

 

After Christmas Day we caught up with the other main museums – the Whitney which has an important collection of modern American art, and a special exhibition of Georgia O'Keefe's abstract paintings.

We queued for a long time in the rain to go into the Guggenheim which was disappointing because the whole gallery was turned over to Kandinsky, with a couple of modern installations which we found frankly dull. I like Kandinsky’s work and it was interesting to see his evolution towards pure abstraction but we’d been looking forward to seeing some of the surrealists’ work that Guggenheim famously collected (she was married for a time to Max Ernst). We found the staff at the Guggenheim fairly unhelpful – OK, it was a horrible wet day and the queue was very long – but their attitude was rude and officious, especially when people asked to use the (totally inadequate) restrooms, after standing in the line for an hour or so.

December 26 was extremely wet. The skyscrapers were wrapped in a mist of rain and all their lovely reflective surfaces were opaque and grey. We got a Metro card and braved the subway. Of course we found it difficult at first – the interconnecting lines, in particular, which are not named as in London and Paris, but numbered, were confusing to us, but Dónall did a brilliant job of navigation

and we began to feel like old hands by the end of the day. We collected a lot of images from the walls of the stations, which have mosaic motifs and numbers that must date from the system’s opening at the beginning of the last century. I was charmed by the rows of wooden seats that stand on the platforms, too – basic, sturdy and rather comfortable, they look like relics from the past and are still doing the job they’re designed for. In general, the tunnels’ unadorned and peeling girders looked forbidding and we felt we’d rather not be found travelling alone on the less frequented stations at night.

Finding ourselves at the Lincoln Center that wet Boxing Night, we bought excellent seats at the performance of “South Pacific” by Rogers and Hammerstein that evening. I’d never seen it on the stage before. It was a lively, colourful performance with a beautifully deep set. And the following evening we already had balcony seats for “Song and Dance” by Sondheim, which we saw in London earlier this year. It was the same Trevor Nunn production but this time starred Angela Lansbury as the Countess and Catherin Zeta Jones as Desirée. Angela Lansbury, especially, was brilliant.

The weather changed back to sunny after 26th. It was milder, too. We found the Frick Museum on 27th – a lovely place created by a man who seems to have been far from charming himself. The paintings he collected by Whistler (elegant society portraits), Holbein (a searing virtuoso portrait of Sir Thomas Moore is unforgettable), Rembrandt (his last and greatest self portrait and “The Polish Rider” stick in my memory above all) Van Eycks, Vermeers and Impressionists – housed in an elegant mansion off Fifth Avenue.

Finally, on 27th, we even managed some retail therapy and dived into Macy’s instead of joining the two-hour queue to go up the Empire State building – that experience will have to wait until we go back to New York at a less crowded season.

But we do fancy New Year in New York, next year.

Myspace blog post - Interesting objects

I intended to focus on finishing a half-finished painting today but when the sun came out properly I stopped pretending and went into the garden to do some summer pruning.

The painting I was going to continue is a study of the chapel that was designed and built by the wife of the celebrated English Victorian artist, George Watts. (You can find information about George watts at http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/person.asp?LinkID=mp04730&role=art.) Mary Watts was also an artist and designer but as often happened in those days (the end of the 19th century) she was overshadowed by the reputation of her famous husband. George did large melodramatic mythological subject paintings and sculptures, but Mary was into Art Nouveau design. They lived and worked in a picturesque rambling house not far from where I live, which has now been turned into a gallery and memorial to George Watts' work.

More interesting to me than the heavy symbolism of the George Watts collection is a little memorial chapel in the cemetery down the road, in the grounds of the house. This chapel was a project that Mary took on, which her husband seems to have regarded as a little hobby to keep Mary from getting too bored. She organised its design and building from first foundation stone to final decorated tile.



It's Italianate in many ways, but it is absolutely Art Nouveau in its character, tall and narrow, and highly decorated in a combination of Italian, Celtic and Romanesque styles. Mary used local craftsman throughout. Compton is a tiny village, and she mobilised most of the work force, including women, to help with the building project.. The bricks and carvings, mouldings and tiles, were locally made. The interior, in particular, is a dreamlike creation, which some people I've spoken to find "creepy", spooky, and claustrophobic.

I began a painting of the exterior last summer but I got rained off, so now I'm going to finish it from the photos. Yesterday I went back to Compton to take some.

Not today, though. I got into cleaning mode. I began polishing up my ship's lamp. This dented copper object stands in the corner of my garden. It's not been converted at all - it's still a paraffin lamp, with a very battered inscription on it: STARBOARD. It also shows the place where it was made - HULL (that's in the northeast of England) and a date, which has lost one of its figures but from the marks left behind is either 1751 or 1731.



I bought this lamp in a breaker's yard in Bangaladesh, in 1984. I wanted a brass one, but that day the only one that the scavengers had left was this copper one, in terrible condition. The setting where I bought it was incredibly sad - a forlorn mudflat, the horizon studded with broken shps of all ages. Wiry thin muddy men at work among the scrap, dismantling the ships that had been brought there to die, haggling over the prices they wanted from the expats who had come to pick over the remains. I felt even more out of place than usual on that beach.

We brought it all the way home to England in 1985 when we were posted back here. Then it sat in our loft for 20 years, still in its crate, because we never did move to the palatial house where it might have been converted to electricity, a chic curiosity to show off to visitors.

When I set up house on my own, I unwrapped my old lamp and cleaned it up. I’ve kept it as a paraffin lamp - it shines with a green starboard glow if you keep the filter inside it and light the wick. As I cleaned it this morning ( my avoidance activity for the morning's painting) I thought about the places it must have been to, the men who must have cleaned it before me, and the storms it had been through.



It needed a lot of work to clean it this morning. I'd neglected it all winter. I ran out of Brasso and remembered what I learned from my bearer in Bangladesh, Ashok. He cleaned all the brass and copper with citrus juice. I had some fresh limes in the fridge so I cut them in half and rubbed them over the surface, left the juice there for a while and then scrubbed and polished. I remembered Ashok's smiling face, his intelligence and his infectious laugh. I remembered his fierce quarrels with the old cook, who was a veteran of the Raj and cooked better Yorkshire puddings than I've tasted anywhere including in England.

Some objects are so valuable for their associations that they really are priceless. I wonder if any of my friends have an object that is valuable for its interest - forget its monetary value. I thought of tagging some of my friends to challenge them to show the most interesting object they own, and explaining why.

I'm choosing five people to tag - I hope they'll write a little blog about their most interesting possession - interesting, remember, not expensive! – and pass the tag on. I’ll look forward to reading them.

New Year's Eve in the Pub (31st December 2007)

New Year's Eve and I was spending it with a new friend, whom I'd only just met. Dinner went well. I cooked it at home because we hadn't booked anywhere - this was a last minute arrangement. Then we had time to kill before midnight - staying in didn't seem to be an option. Television was solid repeats of shows and documentaries shown in the last few days. We didn't know each other well enough to go to bed and occupy each other in more interesting ways. I didn't have any cheerful DVD's to put us in a good mood for midnight. We didn't want to drink and drive so the party that I been invited to was not a good choice. So, he said, I don't go to pubs much, but where's your local?

I didn't think I had a local. Though I live within walking distance of the town centre, all the pubs there look alien and uninviting to me. My "local" was a five-mile drive away.

"There's a pub about five minutes' walk away," I said doubtfully. "I've never been inside and it has boards outside about Quiz Nights and Karaoke." We shuddered in unison. This man and I could make music together, I thought, observing the distaste on his face for such plebeian pursuits.

"OK, we could just take a walk down there and if it looks too bad at least we'll have had some air," he suggested.

It was a fine night, not cold. The decorous streets where I live were deserted. No sign of revelry, no parties. We turned into the street where the pub lurked on the corner. An Edwardian dive, probably a riotous gin palace in its heyday, I thought prissily, as we began to pick up the strains of loud music. When we arrived outside the opaque glazed doors we could see over the wall a small outdoor smoking area, packed with cheerful people laughing and shouting to each other. The smoke from their cigarettes drifted over to us.

Neither of us are smokers. We exchanged disapproving glances but soldiered bravely on. The first entrance we tried was locked.

Probably a private party, we agreed, but went round the corner and gingerly pushed the door. It was stiff to open, perhaps because of the crush of revellers inside, I thought.

The door gave and I stumbled in. And did a double-take. The place was almost empty! Two miserable looking elderly ladies were sipping port at the bar, on high stools. An even more miserable looking man sat a couple of stools down from them. He was clearly on his own and regretting it. In the corner was a group of four twenty-somethings and a dog. One of the girls was rather hopelessly trying to get the men to dance to the music that now assaulted us full blast.

My friend was hovering on the threshold. The music was deafening and he still had the impression that he would have to shoulder his way to the bar, through wildly inebriated revellers, and was summoning up his strength.

"It's OK," I said. "Look."

Even the decor was a surprise. The warm old brick outside led me to expect flock wallpaper, chipped cream dados of Edwardian lincrusta, bentwood kitchen chairs. I hadn't remembered that now we are in the twenty-first century all that is reserved for really chic places in the centre of London. Here, they'd swept it all away and replaced it with whitewashed naked brick walls, exposed steel beams also painted white, black chandeliers, They'd kept (or more likely bought new) small round marble-topped tables. The seating was a combination of white wicker armchairs and leather ones. Very tasteful. I had to admit, it was nice.

We paid a small fortune for a small glass of house red and a cider, and found a seat near the exit to the smoking area. This was still obviously where the action was. When the door opened, we experienced a powerful episode of secondary smoking and made sure it was shut again. Round the corner, in the almost deserted bar area, a large TV was showing Graham Norton's antics leading up to the midnight countdown.

In the same way that your eyes become accustomed to the dark and you begin to see again, our ears gradually began to make sense of the conversation we were trying to have, over the huge decibels of the seventies music that was pounding out. We began to relax. We pointed out the chic details of the decor to each other. We speculated on the possible need of the landlord for some more paintings for the walls (the black-and-white theme made this unlikely, I thought). We exchanged reminiscences about past New Years. We began to enjoy ourselves. We agreed that I did have a local, even though I didn't know anyone in it.

When the countdown to midnight began we were surprised how fast the time had slipped by. Everyone - even the smokers - crowded into the bar in front of the TV screen. We still didn't make a big crowd but there was a big crowd with us on the screen, all packed into Trafalgar Square. The cameras picked out some tiny children, some elderly faces, all colours, all races, all looking up, as we were.

The fireworks on the screen were wonderful. I thought I'd love to have the job that the men in lit up overalls did, cruising back and forth on the river in front of the London Eye, activating the cascades and waterfalls of fireworks, fluid walls of coloured light, painting on the sky on a vast scale so that the Eye became a gigantic catherine wheel, the river a stream of flashing, flowing colours. It went on and on.

The little crowd in the pub around us had suddenly come to life. We were seized and hugged and kissed by girls and men, and seized them in our turn, wishing Happy New Year! Happy New Year! over and over again. It was a night to remember, after all.

I'd forgotten to bring my camera or my mobile phone. Everyone around us was texting and receiving messages. My friend was doing the same and complaining that the network was jammed as usual and he wasn't sure what he'd sent to whom. I didn't mind not having my camera. My mind's eye was enough.

And now I know that I do have a local.

New Painting in Progress

I thought I'd post my present work in progress though it's at a very early stage and it will certainly change a lot before it's finished. The people in the foreground will need some redrawing as I fill in the surrounding areas, I realise. Now that I see the photo of it on the screen I can appreciate the composition in a different way.

My art dealer friend in Sorrento warned me firmly against including people in paintings but for this subject - Positano Beach - I don't see how I can avoid including bathers. Perhaps I should give the painting artistic respectability by entitlng it "Bathers" following the example of Picasso, Cezanne and Renoir (to name but a few.)

I'll let you see it again after New Year's Eve when I hope there will be more to see.

Happy New Year to all my readers, and roll on summer time!

Stage 2



This is after another couple of hours during which I realised that I'd drawn the left hand side of the beach on a different scale and level from the right. This affected the lowest level of the town buildings too, of course. Moral: check that your drawing is accurate before you start to paint, unless you want to do a lot od time-consuning repainting!

I am encouraged by my friends' comments to put in planty of people on the beach, which I'll enjoy doing!



Onwards and upwards then!

Positano Beach - Work in Progress Stage 3



Now the painting is getting very complicated. The distant parts of the beach are very indistinct in the photos I'm using so most of the people are my own invention. The perspective isn't easy and this won't be a very "realistic" picture. But I hope it will have the colour and atmosphere of an Italian beach. Still a long way to go, though.

Positano Beach, Stage 4



Here is the last picture of this composition before I finish it today. I've been photographing it in electric light, at the end of each session of work, and the colours look very yellow as a result. For interest, here is a version that I photographed today in daylight, though still with a flash. The truth about the colour is somewhere in between the two versions. The flash tends to flatten nuances of colour, too. especially in the daylit version (below). I have to paint the detail on the rocks behind the town, the sky, the last section of the town and the far left part of the beach in the fore-and middle-ground. I may add a few more people, too.



Positano Beach - finished (Gouache on Amalfi paper, 45cm x 45cm)



Here is the finished painting. I photographed it using a flash but no yellow light. There is a possiblity that I shall work into the rocks and the far left hand side a little more, but for tonight I'm done!

PS Here is the finished finished painting. I've reworked the left hand side of the beach a little.) Now I shall go on to the next one.

Work in Progress (3)

Here's the last stage of "Positano from the East No2" before I finish it this weekend. I'm not sure about the clouds - they need more shadow I think - and of course I keep seeing windows Ive left out and adjusting the proportions especially in the foreground. There's sill quite a lot to do, even where the buildings look finished.And I still have the last few houses, the sea and the shore to paint. Maybe four more hours will do it.

Work in Progress (2)

Here is another image of my unfinished painting "Positano from the East No 2" in gouache on A2 watercolour paper. I've worked on it for about 4 hours in total today, since the last photo in this series. It needs at least another 8 hours' work, I estimate. I'm not sure whether to include so much sea and sky in the composition and whether to paint some clouds in if I do keep so much sky. The sea is nowhere near finished, nor is the town, and there will be a flotilla of little boats on the water, of course.

Today is the anniversary of William Blake's birth in 1757. He was one of my heroes as a student, for his visionary poems ("Albion" for example) and his illustrations to them. Nowadays I prefer his more lyrical poems, the "Songs of Innocence and Experience". My favourite is still that famous one, "The Tyger".

Work in progress

This is "Positano from the East no 2" in designer's gouache on A2 heavy watercolour paper. The intention is to achieve the jewel-like effect of a mediaeval or Indian painting, and so effects of light and shade ar subordinated to shapes and colours. It was begun two days ago and will take at least two more full days to complete.