Hello all apologies, once again, for my long time absence from blog land – my excuse is that I am shortly starting a new (and hilariously blog-related) job and have been busy busy busy back and forth around the country handing things over and getting increasingly scared. Also I am of course monumentally lazy. So anyway, this will be a quick round up of the last few weeks of cultural pursuits.I went back to the parental home a couple of weeks ago to celebrate, belatedly, my darling mamas birthday. We had an excellent time nosing around the charity shops – although I seem to have a talent for only picking supremely boring books at present – and of course greatly enjoyed the murder hunt!! Yes my home town was the place where that vicar got stabbed, as my mother put it; the most exciting thing to happen in Thornbury since the Norman Conquest. Obviously a horrendous thing to happen but still mucho’s amount of fun to be on the national news!! I wasn’t allowed to smoke outside after nightfall and got to stick my head out of the bathroom window instead – thus proving that every (stabbing) cloud has a silver lining. Anyway, on the Sunday we drove over to Westonbirt Arboretum which is the National Arboretum apparently (you’d think it would be Kew wouldn’t you??). This fabulous beacon of all things Victoriana is obviously well up my street. Started in 1829 – i.e. the heyday of the 19th century mania for exotic plant collection and categorisation (2 of the 3 ‘C’s of the 19th century – the 3rd obviously being colonialism) it has flourished ever since. Obviously not being particularly green of finger I don’t have a huge amount to say about the specimens viewed, also all the information kept telling us was that ‘this species is under threat’ – seriously, all the bloody species seem to be under threat, it was a tad depressing. But one thing that did stick out was the Wollemi Pine which dates back over 200 million years. They thought it was extinct long ago and only knew about it from fossils but then some guy was wandering around some valley in Australia and found it! It’s the most hardy thing ever and actually survived a Nuclear Holocaust – there are trees which survived Hiroshima apparently. Anyway it reminded me of this painting by Francis Danby called The Upas, or Poison-Tree, in the Island of Java, one of my favourite in the V&A:
I have been using up leftover leave days before I move departments so I took a Monday off and decided that would be the perfect time to see the Picasso show at the Tate – clearly it will be unbearably packed on any weekend day. Unfortunatly I also decided on the way that a Monday would also be the perfect day to stop in on Primark Marble Arch and after that I could no longer afford to see a £14 exhibition at the Tate. Frankly though my new cardie which was of equal price was WAY more value for money. Instead I wandered over to the Wallace Collection which is free and therefore excellent value for money. Ahh, the lovely Wallace - place of my art historical youth etc. They’ve actually re-hung quite significantly since I was last there, which was probably a few years ago now I think about it. Every time you go you spot some new treasure. My favourite part of the whole place is obviously the tiling which once covered an entire room but now can only be glimpsed in one small corner – cant believe they would rip this out, sometime in the 30s or 40s I think – I guess we should be glad the building remains in general as most of the old London mansions seem to have been bulldozed around this time. 
This Reynolds picture is, in my humble opinion, one of his all time finest portraits.
My very very favourite piece in the collection has to be this fabulously erotic painting by Ary Scheffer which depicts The Ghosts of Paolo and Francesca Appear to Dante and Virgil – these were two fornicators condemned to one of the many circles of hell for adultery. Bloody hell though if you looked like that wouldn’t you adult? LOVE this pic.
They also have some really juicy Vernet’s which are always good for a laugh and I also always enjoy these two Van Dykes. 
Following my Monday off I took the Friday of that week as annual leave as well and skipped along to the Freud show at the National Portrait Gallery with the mama, who was in London this time. I went to see the big Freud retrospective they had a few years ago with my dad and it was many of the same pieces. It’s his early stuff I really like and this was a new piece to me, a simply stunning self portrait:
It’s when you see images like this, the beloved straggly pot plant that you realise despite being a portraitist Freud clearly had pretty much zero interest in people. Instead everything is treated uniformly; the leaves on this plant are of equal importance to the people sitting in front of it in other portraits in which it featured:
There’s something slightly off balance about the way the studio space features throughout the work of Freud. You always know where you are, you always get the sense that this is Freud’s studio, his space, which is both artificial but also pointedly domestic, almost confrontational in a way. It places all his figures very much as models, not people, in his environment and not their own. They are treated as subjects only, and the naming of most of his works in generic ‘portrait of a women’ type ways heightens this sense of the impersonal and disconnected. It also, if we are going to engage in a bit of dated Clarkist discourse, places them very much in the role of the naked rather than nude. These are real people, but we know nothing about them, and it’s uncomfortable in a way you don’t feel when standing in front of an idealised nude, we are made to see them almost as figures in the life of Freud, not people in their own right.One other thing that struck me about his work was how unbelievably backwards and dated he must have seen in the 60s. Everyone else is changing the world, changing art, changing the way we viewed ourselves – and he is producing painterly swirls on canvas. What must Warhol have thought???
Love the one above - quote from Tissot I think?
Anyway some very enjoyable cultural pursuits over the last couple of weeks. See you soon!! 
Morning everyone. Today I’m feeling like total shit because I spontaneously, and therefore unwisely, lobbed off all my hair last week. I now have a shitty bob – or not even a bob it looks like a grown out version of something that use to be a bob. I look about 12 am totally mortified and depressed will take over 3 years to grow it out to its old length and I look like total crap. Really feel like crying right here and now. Just what you need when you’re trying to find a nice boyfriend. Feel like shaving the whole thing off. Anyway am too miserable to write much today which is lucky because I haven’t got much to say.
I am almost embarrassed for him. And there is a painting, taken directly from the photo that appeared in the paper, of a beautiful woman who was implicated in the Rwandan genocide of the 90s. That’s it really; the fact that she was beautiful yet implicated in genocide was the meaning behind this. And that it was a photo in the paper. Yes. Really. Talk about lightweight. Unfortunatly for you I can’t find an image of it. But here, as a final damning example (I hope) is a painting he has made from the Seurat bathers. He quite likes the original. That’s all. 
After this high of interwoven insightful contemporary pondering (?) I was put in such a bad mood I had to go and sit in the café for an hour or so, to calm down, it was just such an overwhelming artistic experience I couldn’t take anymore (?). Luckily here something fab happened – I actually managed to get into a book!! It has been MONTHS since I read a new novel. According to my book list in fact (yes I have a book list and I have started dating it) the last book I read was on the 9th September!!!!!!!!????!?!? I reread a few much loved kids books in between then and now but basically I have had the most awful reading block this Autumn and I HATE not being able to read – but anyway, I started something and have finished it and will soon start the next. Tres happy.
Morning all. Today I am wearing very red lipstick as it’s grey and drizzly outside and I need cheering up – every little helps etc. (It’s not a Tesco lipstick, its Lancôme, although I did hear that Marks and Spencer’s makeup is made by Chanel, so there you go). Luckily the weather this weekend, as you probably know, was blazingly glorious and my lipstick wasn’t required to brighten up any cultural pursuing. Phew. I actually wasn’t quite sure if I would have time to fit in a pursuit at all this weekend as I spent most of it out of London. However, I managed to do a quick gallery search using my very useful Timeout iPhone app on the train on the way back in and came across a fabulous newly opened space which I am now uber uber excited about, namely because it was high Victoriana and FREE!! None of this bullshit £15 crap for a mediocre exhibition which would just put me into a bad mood before I even got in:
He hired the celebrated Gothic Revival architect John Loughborough Pearson who was something of a star at this point (the house was completed in 1895) and also the various skills of craftsman such as the sculptors 
This incredible mishmash of historical and literary sources and architectural styles has to be the most brilliant place to stage an exhibition of William Morris. As the intro on the gallery website states: ‘The inaugural exhibition looks at how William Morris told stories through pattern and poetry. It will examine the tales that were most important to him, such as the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Norse saga, Arthurian legend and Greek myth.’ So pretty perfect space for it then. I thought this could all be summed up well by some text at the very beginning of the show quoting Ford Madox Brown. I paraphrase massively here as can’t remember what he exactly said but it was something along the lines of Morris’s inspiration being unchanging; the things that interested him as a child continued to inspire him throughout his life, the stories and myths of childhood serving him right up to death. Which seems to be the same for Astor who’s childhood literary loves clearly stayed with him in an extremely palpable way throughout maturity and old age. Sums up a large amount of the 19th century really – it was an era of childhood nostalgia in the face of blinding modernity and very serious adult concerns. They were basically a race of overgrown teenage girls. Which is why I love them. 
The first room of the show dealt mainly with Morris’s collaborative tapestry and embroidery work with Burne-Jones – my favorite Pre-Raphaelite. Yay! Together they were obsessed with the work of Chaucer, as everyone pretty much was at this time. They illustrated books of his work and there was a very fine example of Burne-Jones stained glass depicting some of the major characters. I’ve never actually read any Chaucer so can’t really comment a huge amount on this. This room also contained some beautiful but rather weird tapestries that illustrated a text both Morris and Burne-Jones found huge inspiration from called Roman de la Rose (Romance of the Rose). This was a medieval French text that was believed to have been translated by Chaucer himself which is probably how Morris and Burne-Jones became familiar with it. What immediately struck me about the work inspired by this tale was there undeniable similarities to the work Burne-Jones made around the sleeping beauty story or as he called it the Briar Rose and in fact I believe the tapestries and works in this series were often subtitled Briar Rose. Here, like in the sleeping beauty series, a tangle of suffocating rose brambles seems to encase and imprison the medieval style figures set within. It is used as an intense decorative background pattern but also communicates a sense of timelessness and imprisonment. The story is an allegory of the medieval ideals of courtly love (I think I am going to start trying this – it’s basically like an extreme version of The Rules) where some guy stumbles across a secret heavenly style garden and glimpses a bed of roses in some fountain of love and sets about to try and pick them, or conquer love, with various allegories of love and the vices helping and hindering him along the way. Various tapestries were designed and made for various country house commissions but unfortunately they seem to have faded quite a lot. The three or four on show here are still impressive in terms of the texture and density of the embroidery which gives a kind of focus-less pattern like quality to the pieces.
Above the stairs were examples of Morris’s fabric designs. This was very interesting indeed as it went into some depth about the concepts behind Morris’s decorative inventions. He believed that creating textile patterns was part of a long historical dialogue going back thousands of years. Through using the traditional motifs of flowers, plants and animals he was engaging in the historical legacy of generations of craftsman who used the same motifs to create meaning and a narrative of design which transcends the individual identity of the artist and craftsman. Morris admired cultures that had a long aural or craft tradition, passing down skills as well as stories and myths throughout the generations to create a longevity of cultural identity. If you know what I mean. He also employed symbols and motifs which had personal resonance for him such as the use of the Thames as a theme, a river he felt a great connection to both personally and professionally. 
Other large and glorious tapestries were on show upstairs executed by either the Royal Society of needlework or Morris’s own design firms but the pieces I really enjoyed were the incredibly beautiful etchings by Burne-Jones for an abandoned project to illustrate Morris’s ‘great storybook’ The Earthly Paradise. This work is again perfectly in tune with the theme of the building and therefore high Victoriana in general i.e. the collation of multiple historical sources and inspirations bound together in one book. The stories were bound together by a narrative about a group of medieval wanderers who, thwarted in their search for a land of everlasting life discover instead a surviving colony of 
I could go on for another 4 pages about all the fabulous things in this show but I need to do some work today so instead I recommend you all visit this amazingly exiting new space – it’s free!!!