please empty your brain below

you might have just tempted me DG ... the paintings are beautiful ... I'll give the stuffed flamingo a miss (sorry) but the thought of a NUDE espresso is titillating (who is nude, me or the espresso?)
A shame I'll miss the exhibition as my next planned trip to London isn't till August. For one reason or another I have ended up in the Bow area quite a few times in the last few years and I quite like it. If I were ever to move back to London I would definitely consider the area. I was last there a few weeks ago making a few 'Now and Then' images.
"admire the flyover" ...think like many a tower block and underpass the time for admiration has long waned. I live not far from both a underpass and a flyover...and both give me the feeling that where I live is a place to "quickly" pass thru whilst on the way to/from "better places".
I went to The Nunnery at the weekend, and it's a fine little exhibition of interesting, local art. Like you, DG, I've lived in the area for many years, and I agree that it was fascinating to see some recognisable landmarks as they were (and in some cases still are, minus a Ferodo ad or so).

I combined it with a stroll up the Lea (past McD's, across the roundabout and sharp left) to one of your earlier suggestions – the Great British Garden at the Olympic Park. Very nice, and good to go now before they build a hulking great block of flats right next to it. Here's your piece about it:

http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/visiting-qeop.html

Then lunch at the Crate Brewery, a stroll across Vicky Park and a 388 bus home. Perfect day out.
I liked your fourth paragraph in particular, and that is, I think, because it expresses one of the things art is supposed to do for viewers.
DG, you wrote,
"I can't tell you how good it is to be able to walk through the door of my local art gallery and be faced by thirty actual paintings for a change, rather than four modern 'artworks' deftly arranged to try to fill the space."

I feel compelled to tell you and your comment-readers something funny that happened to me years ago.

I was a professional artist whose style was more like illustration than fine art. My work was praised by people who liked my style of painting, but my work also would be criticized by "fine arts" painters, perhaps for being too illustrative, too realistic, and not "painterly" enough.

Fine. You can't please everyone. Art is personal, and it means different things to different people.

So, at some point, I entered a national art competition that put on a huge yearly show of artworks relating to the very specific nature subject that I specialized in painting. My clients all told me I should enter it, as it was quite a prestigious event. I entered a spectacular painting, one of my best ever. So good that it appeared on a magazine cover later, albeit an obscure one. The painting was large and cost me quite a bit of money to pay for shipping it to the competition and back. I had high hopes.

It didn't even win fourth place in its category for that medium. I was disappointed, but contests are always risky.

The funny thing is, the first-place winner in one of the categories was so abstract that it was actually printed upside down in the catalog.
"I can't tell you how good it is to be able to walk through the door of (an) art gallery and be faced by thirty actual paintings for a change...to view art that depicts somewhere..."

I've edited you shamelessly, but this is why many of us would rather see ten exhibitions like this rather than spend £200K on restoring some Mark Rothko piece of meaningless SHIT.

I am unlikely to make it to the show (though will try) but will certainly order the book.

Thank you for this post. My annual holiday in London starts next Tuesday. I plan to include a visit to the Nunnery in my itinerary. That's in addition to visits I will be making to East Grinstead, Eynsford, and Totteridge, based on some of your previous posts.
Is that the "Ferodo" bridge near Campbell Road?

The photo takes you to a Flickr login :-(.

Definitely will visit the exhibition, thank you for your blogpost.
Yes, that's the Ferodo Bridge near Campbell Road.

Visitors intending to travel long distances should note the comment in my final paragraph about likely visiting times, and probably combine their look round the gallery with a longer trip to the Olympic Park (which is a short walk up the road).
"A perfunctory three weeks' holiday to Bognor" - I wonder how the working classes of a century and more ago might have reacted to the assumption that they would even have the option to turn their noses up at such a thing.










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