Favourite paintings

"I love Dorothea. I want to spend the rest of my life with her. The picture is part of that life." 

Max Ernst, refusing a collector interested in Birthday, quoted in Tanning, Dorothea: Between Lives, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois 2004, p.72

Even though I lived in Spain for ten months years ago, I never made it to Madrid during that time. For my birthday this year John was going to take me there, as he knew how obsessed I was with Las Meninas by Velázquez; ever thoughtful, he wanted to make sure I would get to see it in real life. This was back in May, and due to some sporting event flying to Madrid wouldn't have worked out, so we picked Edinburgh instead, another place I had never visited.

As fate would have it, my chemo started sooner than expected and the first round was on my birthday, so we had to cancel the trip. While we still haven't gone to Edinburgh, going to Madrid in November turned out to be perfect timing. Not only did we get to see Las Meninas (and had the room to ourselves for 15 minutes, as we went first thing in the morning) and Picasso's Guernica, both of which moved me to tears, but the Reina Sofía museum happens to be hosting a large exhibition of Dorothea Tanning's work, so I got to see another of my favourite paintings, Birthday (see first photo). Seeing those three paintings, and all within the space of two days, was so powerful, I won't even attempt to describe the impact they had on me.

I had read Tanning's memoir Between Lives, and while I knew her later work was very different from the surrealism of paintings such as the ones pictured above, I only properly discovered that part of her oeuvre through this exhibition. Her soft sculptures, including this installation, were also quite an experience.

I am highly attuned to synchronicities these days (my sister wrote about one relating to books here): I was delighted that Birthday came to me during a trip which should have marked my birthday; the significance of rooms and doors both in this painting and in Las Meninas; and later in the Prado I was struck by how some of El Greco's work had similar neon-like accents as Tanning's later paintings - vibrant pigment on writhing abstracted bodies. And just now, I realised that I wrote about Velázquez here exactly a year ago. And I can echo Laura Cumming's words, which I quoted at the beginning of that blog post. I, too, am so grateful for and consoled by Velázquez.

Charleston

The garden at Charleston

 

 The pond

 The front of the house, with bonus bearded man

  Walking across fields of gold from Charleston to Berwick Church

 Berwick Church

 Killer colour combo in Lewes

This summer, when we were in London for a wedding, we added on a night in Lewes at the beginning of the weekend, so we could visit Charleston, the country home the painter Vanessa Bell rented for decades, which was frequented by other members of the Bloomsbury Group, including John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry (and of course Bell's sister Virginia Woolf), as a temporary home, meeting place and refuge.

In Lewes we stayed in this lovely B&B, run by an artist. Our bedroom had a jasmine bush trailing outside the window, so this place ticked all the boxes and more and was the perfect prelude to our day trip.

I am fascinated by the Bloomsbury Set and am working my way through their oeuvres and their biographies. Years ago I bought two hefty volumes by and about Virginia Woolf, respectively, and more recently it has been the painters in the circle that have caught my attention. I left the museum shop at Charleston with Angelica Garnett's honest memoir about growing up as the daughter of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (for the first 17 years of her life she thought Clive Bell was her father) and a card of this dog, as I love long-nosed animals and the story behind this one.

We did a guided tour of the house, which was a good introduction (photos of the interior can be found on the website in the first link above), but the next time I would like to go on a Sunday, when there is a volunteer in each room and people can wander around at their own pace. The house is a treasure trove not only of all the artworks (both by inhabitants of the house and by artists they collected), but also of the idiosyncratic Charleston interior design by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. While my tastes are more minimalist, their style works so harmoniously, and on our return to Ireland I did feel the urge to decorate the panels of our doors and create my own wallpaper and fabric.

After the tour we spent some time in the beautiful cottage garden (my day job involves working closely with the University art collection, which includes this painting by Roger Fry - it was exciting to see the pond in real life) and then walked the forty minutes or so across the fields to Berwick Church, which has murals painted by Bell and Grant and Bell's son Quentin. We had dinner and drinks sitting in the beer garden of a nearby pub (we were very lucky with the weather) before getting a taxi back to Lewes, which is worth visiting in itself.

Random London moments

Very random. Most of these were taken by Matt - I am not good at taking pictures when out and about. I did take a disproportionate amount of pictures of flowers, which Matt informed me was a misplaced focus when in a big city (I may have stood with my back to St.Paul's for a bit too long photographing tulips). We took quite a few pictures of our feet.

|  In and on London (basement floor in Stanford's travel bookshop). My clothes were impractical on many levels (I was not prepared for single digit temperatures), but I managed to walk comfortably in heels for an entire day.

|  We were too early for the Ballgowns exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the fashion room was closed for preparations for said exhibition, but we got to see this (as well as the tiny waistcoat of a dwarf performer from the 19th century that made me cry a bit).

|  I was in art materials heaven in the biggest art supplies shop I have ever visited, but because I had travelled only with hand luggage, I limited myself to a few coloured pencils to add to my Faber-Castell Polychromos collection (they had all the colours). I buy them individually - I know a whole set might work out cheaper, but it is more fun to grow it slowly, and I remember which ones I bought where. I took a long time to decide which colours to choose this time.

 |  Bell print in the Old Bell pub in Fleet Street, which housed Christopher Wren's stonemasons.

|  I think this photo Matt took of the Great Court in the British Museum looks a bit like a Lowry painting (the feet!). My favourite part is the kid on the floor at the bottom of the stairs with his leg in the air.

|  In the museum: Matt loves models of forts and other structures. I particularly loved the tiny animals and people in this one. But I spent more time with the mummies and skeletons, morbid person that I am.

|  Speaking of skeletons, I was endlessly fascinated by Jeremy Bentham's Auto-icon in UCL (the real, badly mummified head has been replaced by a wax version, but the skeleton is still in these clothes).

|  Pigeons in line in a small park in Bloomsbury. 

|  Feet again. There were also lots of bluebells in that park. I learnt about British, Spanish and hybrid bluebells. Britain's plant enthusiasts are worried about its native bluebell, as it cross-breeds with the Spanish and the resulting hybrid bluebell.

 |  Behind Westminster Abbey.