out in the art world

There is one museum I go to every time I come to London.
Not the Tate or the Tate Modern. Not the National or the V&A.
Not the Cortauld or the John Soane........
No....  not me. I go to the Imperial War Museum.
It is in Lambeth.  In the old nuthouse hospital.

I go and look at rowing boats that carried soldiers back from the failed landing at Dunkirk.
I walk round replicas of terraced houses from 1942 where there are black lines drawn in the bath tubs to stop people from wasting water.  I listen on head phones to stories of soldiers, or wardens, or land girls. I sit in the Blitz Experience and hear the bombs landing above the underground station I have chosen as a shelter.  I walk through the trenches of Flanders and smell the mustard gas. I walk round the holocaust exhibit with it's glass walls of leftover shoes.
I stare up at the tiny planes that flew for hours and hours in dark skies over the channel and hopefully back again.
I go to the war rooms. sitting below Downing Street. Where Churchill and his cabinet went underground. There is his bed with his reading tray. His wooden chair where you can feel the grooves his worried hand made in the wood with his signet ring. The war room itself where men and women moved pins in maps and pushed wooden boats and with chalk on blackboards kept tally of who was where and what damage could be expected.

The last shot of " Oh What a Lovely War."

I buy postcards.


I buy books.


I am now a member.













I have spread my wings further.

I went to the Royal Academy and saw the summer Exhibition.

my favorite really. two dogs , waiting

think it is a railway map ....

I went to the National Portrait and saw The William Eggleston

a William Eggleston. Missippi. 1969. His uncle and his driver jasper at a funeral

tad, by john Borowicz

Jean by Jean Paul Tibbles

and the BP Portrait Competition at the national Portrait Gallery.

tetras by laura Guoke

I went Buckingham Palace and saw the Queen's frocks and a few unremarkable rooms. No wonder she likes zipping off to Sandringham and Balmoral. Room after room of boring red and gold bits.

yes , the Queen. yes, Obama and Michele.yes, red and gold.

I went to Kew to see " the Hive.". a web of metal. Where you take an ice lolly stick between your teeth and put it in a lost and bite down to hear the sounds you would if you were a bee in a hive.
Oh yes....bring on the toast and honey....

The ceiling of he hive.

The Imperial War Museum aside...because I am now in the Inner Circle.

It is the people that go to these exhibits at the Academy that become as fascinating as the artwork.





Flamboyant elderly men in bright glasses and surprising socks, pairs of elderly women who come very year and have their lunch reservations in place. Families, where the unwilling children are under instruction.                                                                                                                                                               Young people, on their own...wandering through with pink hair and tattered tights.

friend and sculpture above his head of deer's head made out of wire coat hangers.

I can't do more than one a week. I don't process art the same way I do words.






But I am liking the idea of going back to see things twice.
Like a restaurant where you eat Spaghetti Arabiatta every time you go.
It's always good and each time you taste something else in the sauce.....

my spaghetti supper in the garden at battersea.