Jungle Fever
Started out 2006 with a trip to Tate Modern to see the Rousseau “Jungles In Paris” exhibition this afternoon, since my godmother has lent me her membership card and we could get in for free. Having taken up watercolours at City Lit last term I have grown even huger respect for artists who can “do it properly” and put my own meagre efforts to shame. Rousseau has astonishingly detailed brushwork, a vibrant use of colour and tonality, and is just too bloody good at painting trees. Despite not being professionally trained, he actually taught watercolours to try to drag himself out of abject poverty. He could no doubt have shown me a thing or two, whatever snide comments his critics may have made of his use of perspective. Watercolours really are rather difficult, despite how easy Hannah Gordon made them look on all those episodes of Watercolour Challenge I used to subtitle. All the paintings in this exhibition were oils, a medium which I might feel more at home in, since you can slap on lots of bright colours very quickly, are allowed to be abstract, and can paint over your mistakes. Oh, to have been blessed with a bit more patience!
As with the Frida Kahlo exhibition last year (so soon...), the Rousseau show is wonderfully placed into context, with photos, leaflets, letters and films of the period and the Paris that he lived in. He never went abroad, basing his tigers, monkeys, palms and tropical flowers from botanical and zoological gardens in Paris, and fuelling the city’s fascination for all things colonial in the process. The exhibition contains scary photos of mock tribal villages from the World’s Fair of 1889, where they’d shipped in natives from various French colonies and made them recreate their home environment for all to stare at.
The Tate (and all of London’s art galleries) is one thing I will truly miss if we leave London, though I’m still not sure about Rachel Whiteread’s plastic white cube installation. (Bring back the giant red ear trumpet. Or the Weather Project. The Weather Project, with its fog that made people high, was cool.) Tate Modern has one of the city’s smartest bars (for members only) which serves tapas and Pimms and is air-conditioned in summer. And the vistas of St Paul’s from every floor are just magnificent. This afternoon the cityscape glowed pink in the setting sunlight and children were playing on a giant snowslide outside. So many films feature that view – Tate Modern has served as two different universities (Spooks, Enduring Love) and a swanky hotel (Sugar Rush) in the past year alone.
So, 2006, eh? Who knows where we’ll be by the end of it? A year in which my mum will never exist. That sobering thought meant I couldn’t even be bothered to stay up until midnight last night. Though that was partly because I couldn’t face any more alcohol, as I had the hangover from hell after spending the previous evening downing shots of Canadian maple whisky in the company of a fine group of friends. January is our detox month, bar those last few tempting morsels of leftover Christmas chocolate. I’ve got to go back on my wheat and dairy free diet, which a nutritionist put me on a couple of months ago in a bid to get my thyroid gland to reduce in size. It’s a mean woman that deprives me of cheese.
On that note, have a good one.
REBECCA
As with the Frida Kahlo exhibition last year (so soon...), the Rousseau show is wonderfully placed into context, with photos, leaflets, letters and films of the period and the Paris that he lived in. He never went abroad, basing his tigers, monkeys, palms and tropical flowers from botanical and zoological gardens in Paris, and fuelling the city’s fascination for all things colonial in the process. The exhibition contains scary photos of mock tribal villages from the World’s Fair of 1889, where they’d shipped in natives from various French colonies and made them recreate their home environment for all to stare at.
The Tate (and all of London’s art galleries) is one thing I will truly miss if we leave London, though I’m still not sure about Rachel Whiteread’s plastic white cube installation. (Bring back the giant red ear trumpet. Or the Weather Project. The Weather Project, with its fog that made people high, was cool.) Tate Modern has one of the city’s smartest bars (for members only) which serves tapas and Pimms and is air-conditioned in summer. And the vistas of St Paul’s from every floor are just magnificent. This afternoon the cityscape glowed pink in the setting sunlight and children were playing on a giant snowslide outside. So many films feature that view – Tate Modern has served as two different universities (Spooks, Enduring Love) and a swanky hotel (Sugar Rush) in the past year alone.
So, 2006, eh? Who knows where we’ll be by the end of it? A year in which my mum will never exist. That sobering thought meant I couldn’t even be bothered to stay up until midnight last night. Though that was partly because I couldn’t face any more alcohol, as I had the hangover from hell after spending the previous evening downing shots of Canadian maple whisky in the company of a fine group of friends. January is our detox month, bar those last few tempting morsels of leftover Christmas chocolate. I’ve got to go back on my wheat and dairy free diet, which a nutritionist put me on a couple of months ago in a bid to get my thyroid gland to reduce in size. It’s a mean woman that deprives me of cheese.
On that note, have a good one.
REBECCA
posted by Rebecca Dodgson | 7:04 pm
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