Sourced cheap (£12.50!!!) train tickets to go to London last Wednesday with my daughter to visit the Matisse exhibition before it closes today. We traveled, (not following football) unexpectedly, with England football supporters from Manchester which made for interesting overheard conversations.
This was my first time on the underground tube - moving rather fast and challenging my vertigo on the seeming maze of escalators. My reality shifted - being thrown into all these lines and angles and machinery took me into the realm of modernist paintings. Negotiating the metal stairwell, to get the first tube to Greenway Park, with the dry heat building as we spiraled downwards, I was reminded of Dante and the descent into hell! An overworking imagination aside, the tube journey was rather good. Another shift in reality occurred as we passed a block of apartments ranging from 3.45 million with its own version of a corner (?) shop. We went to the Poetry and Dream exhibition which I was excited to note had work by Joseph Beuys. I was also particularly intrigued by the Brodsky Utkin imaginary architectures. Even though we had to book a time slot to look at Matisse’s work it was still packed with people vying for space to observe Matisse’s work from chosen vantage points. In our hour visit, the 14 rooms proved wonderful and exhausting to wander through while absorbing all the fantastic colours and shapes across Matisse’s whole practice in our very short span of allowed space and time. We were lucky enough to be in Cagnes sur Mer last summer - a place Matisse visited and fell in love with the quality of the light there. He is quoted as saying ‘When I realized I would see that light every morning, I could not believe my happiness’ - and as I looked at piece after piece of Matisse’s work I realised that it is the colours in his art pieces which are the hypnotic attention holding element. We got home around 1am and I was back to work the next day brimful of colour and shape - a happiness absolutely worth it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
LinksGeraldine Monk Archives
October 2017
|