The week of un-birthday festivities and presents following my actually single birthday took a downward turn today. Not only has it been raining all night, with howling wind and melodramatic thunder and lightning, but also, when I woke up the electricity had failed.
I washed by the light of my mobile phone, refused to shave as the hot water wasn’t – see above, electricity failure – and hobbled downstairs (knees still not even remotely right) like some senile hi-tec Lady of the Lamp to do ‘something’ to the box of electricity switches and fuses. I duly pushed up all those that were down, and nothing happened.
I debated not going for my early morning swim in the local pool, reasoning that perhaps the outage had extended to their premises, and while I am more than prepared to get up early, I draw the line at swimming in cold water. But I thought to myself, who else is going to brave the rain, the dark and the pre-dawn? Only I!
I was, of course, wrong, and there were plenty of other saddos ready and eager to get their daily exercise over and done with before most people were awake.
As I am retired, I do not need to be there early ‘before work’, but I find that getting up (at what I am sure my grandparents would have called a ‘reasonable time’) has now become so engrained in me that to lie in bed after the alarm goes off gives little pleasure.
I wish that I could say that I make full and enthusiastic use of my gained time – but what I do is read The Guardian and thoroughly depress myself before breakfast.
Living in Catalonia, you would think that I would be able to be fairly detached from what is going on in the UK – and, to a certain extent I can be (or at least try to be) but the political, social, and economic situation in Spain is not rosy either. Admittedly, we have not committed the idiocy of Brexit, and our Covid figures are nowhere as horrific as those in the UK, but there is little in present day Catalonia to make one wake up and skip one’s way cheerily into the day – but at least the day in Catalonia usually has sun in it!
My art books are my escape. Which is an odd thing to say because the sort of art that I like is rarely of the chocolate box niceness, and the arresting images that contemporary art slams into your mind rarely take you away from the world but force you back into it in an uncompromising manner.
Sometimes the struggle is not with the images, but rather with the juxta-positioning that some curators impose on collections or exhibitions. Having read through the catalogue for the Poussin exhibition in the National, I was reminded of another exhibition involving Poussin that I went to see in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in which Poussin’s paintings were paired with the coloured scribblings of Cy Twomby. The Poussin paintings were his series of The Sacraments while Twomby’s paintings were, um, not.
I am no fan of Twomby’s art, though you might be interested to know that I am in a minority, and in 2015 his Untitled (New York City) was sold at auction for $70,530,000 – so what do I know!
You might like to compare the two artists:
POUSSIN
TWOMBY
As I keep telling myself, the money is not relevant to the art. Money is just the commodification of art. What value people and institutions place on individual artists is something to consider in evaluating the place of art in a particular society, but it has little to say about the true value of art.
I still don't like Twomby.
