Today's art

I expected to like the current exhibition of Carol Rhodes' work at the Modern Art Gallery, after leafing through the accompanying book. However, this is an example where reproduction is very kind to the work. I expected large monumental landscapes, but they were quite small, looking rather forlorn in the large rooms. They also strike me as lazy and dull, combining a number of pretentious features: the lack of frames, the deliberate "naivety", and an ironic distance from the subject. At their best, there is an echo of Edward Hopper, but only just.

Never mind. It was free and the cafe downstairs is excellent.

A dose of art

I should be more grateful for living in Edinburgh. There aren't too many places where you can pop out on a whim to see some Turner watercolours. These are part of the permanent collection of the National Gallery, but are only show in January when it's dim. Mr Vaughan was very kind to do this, but he obviously never realised that the light in a gallery could be artificially controlled.

I like the way the Portrait Gallery always has some wee exhibitions in the gaps between the headliners. In particular the quirky things they put on next to the cafe are always a delight. They currently have some portraits generated from death masks in an Edinburgh collection. The results are eerie, beautiful "photographs" of people who, in most cases, died before the invention of photography.

I am a lazy blogger

The parents seem to be settling down now and need only occasional maintenance. The weather is classic Northern Europe in January: dark (I have the lights on and it's 11am), damp, and cold. (Surely, ancient humans used to hibernate? If not, surely they at least spent a lot of time in the cave under the prehistoric version of a duvet, living off body fat?) I also keep forgetting my password for Blogger and it's quite an exercise to reset. But enough excuses.

Still here

I know, I've been a bit quiet recently. A mixture of giving up my job, having to be nursemaid/butler to aging and ailing parents, and visiting Prague over Christmas, probably accounted for this. It's been a miserable month or so (though Prague was good). I just hope 2008 gets better. Focus on the positive: at least I don't have any more commuting.