To complete my previous blog, I’d like to add pots by clay artists who are permanent members of Contemporary Applied Arts. This gallery shows the best of British Fine Crafts.

This was my final day in England and I was determined to make the most of it, in spite of having picked up one of those beastly colds that one does on a trip like this. I stopped in at a Starbucks for a latte and a ‘toastie’ while admiring the new addition to Tate Modern. When I was last here there were huge cranes and much building going on but now I saw the extraordinary brick extension to the once plain power station that is Tate Modern Art gallery.

Inside I simply took myself to all the free exhibits, most of which I’ve seen before but was pleased to admire the real paintings again. On my previous visit I loved seeing the big Sonia Delaunay exhibit so felt pulled to her works in the permanent collection.

Other pieces that grabbed me were the Bridget Riley paintings and one by Gerhard Richter.

I also enjoyed a carpet and a tapestry hanging side by side, the carpet by Iranian Parviz Tanavoli who works in Canada, and the tapestry by Briton Eduardo Paolozzi. 

Then I noticed that there is an elevator to the tenth floor which didn’t exist before. Check it out! said I and I found myself with other tourists, up amongst the skyscrapers of the South Bank. How London has changed since I lived there over fifty years ago! St Paul’s, once an outstanding landmark, is tiny in my little video here. You can see it across the Millennium pedestrian bridge on the Thames’ North side. Also remarkable on this day was the peculiar colour of the sky. I was reminded of our BC skies this summer when the air was filled with particulates from horrendous forest fires here and South of us in the States. The sun was red at mid-day. A fellow tourist explained that Hurricane Ophelia which was just then blowing off the West coast of Ireland had brought Sahara sand and particulates from fires burning in Portugal to the skies over England. It felt positively apocalyptic.

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Feeling pretty dreadful, I decided to skip the nephew-recommended boat trip to Tate Britain to see the work of Rachael Whiteread and instead make my way gently back to Waterloo, and an above-ground train back to Mortlake where I was staying. As I poddled along the Embankment I remembered that people go ‘mudlarking’ along the banks of the Thames. I have seen photos of fascinating historical finds bearing witness to the City of London’s ancient history, dating back to Londinium and before. When I was a college student, at a Teacher Training College in Camberwell I was lucky to have taken a course on the History of London. What a treat! ‘Go to the Museum of London, check what is underground in London besides the tube, visit bits of Roman wall’.. good memories. Mudlarkers are permitted to collect surface finds that the tide may have turned up, but no digging is allowed. I thought perhaps this was the day for me to find a significant piece of a Bellarmine salt-glazed German wine jar! Nobody was on the South shore of the muddy, forbidding river, but as I walked West I spotted a staircase down to the beach of smooth pebbles.

On a very windy and oddly dark day I spent a contented fifteen minutes pretending to be a Mudlark. My finds are modest – just potsherds and some pieces of broken clay pipes – but they travelled back to Canada with me as lucky talismans for my 9 1/2 hour flight the next day. The curved handle piece is one I picked up on a previous London stay, from the shore at Putney. Silly me.

It is now over two weeks since I got back to Port Moody. We’ve had an unusually beautiful period of Fall colour but now, as we prepare to turn our clocks back, and the weather has turned much colder I have been getting back to my studio. The ‘Raiders’ are trying to find days when they can get out here for a plate-painting day so life is settling back to routine.

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My English friend Julia and I sometimes meet up in London and last time she took me to the Royal Academy where she was a member and we were so moved by the Anselm Kiefer show. This year we agreed to go to Tate Modern together and, thanks to my niece Julia’s membership, were able to lunch in the members’ lounge and enter the two entry-fee shows. Otherwise admission is free to most British art galleries.

We found the minimalist grid-like paintings by Agnes Martin rather hard work, quite honestly. But at least I’ll now know how and what she painted.

But I was most enthusiastic about seeing Sonia Delaunay’s work and explained to Julia that I had written one of my first Art History papers in a Modern Art History class on Sonia Delaunay and Piet Mondrian. As a young woman of the sixties I was thrilled to find an artist who was using psychedelic patterns and colours at the beginning of the twentieth century. And she didn’t just paint, she was a needlewoman and fabric designer. Piet Mondrian was in Paris at the same time as Sonia and I found that although their work went in very different directions their beginnings and influences were related.

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/ey-exhibition-sonia-delaunay

Actually it was more delightful than I expected to see the Delaunay work in person. Previously I had only studied it from books and slides. The paintings are huge and so bold and colourful. I snuck photos of just a few pieces; three murals for the Palace of the Air in the Paris Exhibition 1937, depicting a propellor, an engine and an instrument panel, an example of a coat she designed and a display case which featured her fabrics on a moving roller. My friend Eric says that item may not have accompanied this show when he and Karen saw it in New York in 2011. One of the fabrics was very much like one of his designs!

Sadly this show ended on Aug 9th so I was lucky to have caught it.

Before I met Julia at Waterloo and took the bus to Tate Modern I had already zipped up on the Northern Line to Tottenham Court Road to visit the Contemporary Ceramics Gallery across from the British Museum. After Julia left me to take the train back to her home in Tonbridge I managed to find the relocated (from its previous location on Percy St) Contemporary Applied Arts Gallery. Photos from those two galleries will appear soon.

The area around Tate Modern and all along the South Bank is being developed at an incredible rate. There seems to be no shortage of building funds in London. When I walked with family members in this area last year, after seeing the fabulous poppy display at the Tower of London, I was impressed then at the gentrification of this previously industrial part of the city.

When I was studying Modern Art back in 1991 I was also taking print-making. So I combined assignments by making two dry-point etching portraits of Piet Mondrian and Sonia Delaunay. I have enjoyed an excuse to re-discover work I’d liked so much back then and find and re-read my paper. Excellent Art History lecturer Ann Morrison gave me 98/100 for it too!

The next day Al went up to the British Museum and UCL while I walked from Waterloo Station to Tate Modern, about a 15-minute walk. Once there I wandered all through, taking photos of pieces that appealed to me, mostly sculptural. I had lunch in a cafeteria and snuck into a private area on the top so that I could take a photograph down at The Globe Theatre. And I took far too many pics of the clouds gliding over St Pauls and the Millenium Bridge (which doesn’t wobble at all now!). To see titles for the pics glide the cursor over the image and the words should appear.