Cambridge/Paris March 2014

On March 20, 2014 we flew to England and spent three days with our son, Emmett, in Cambridge and on March 24 we flew to Paris and were there until

Sunday March 30, 2014. It was a wonderful trip and it ended up being about family, food, art, and the beauty of the physical world both rural and urban.

It was a much needed trip and was in many ways regenerative and helped to lift

the dark stain from my vision of life after a long, hard winter in Toronto.

Here are a couple of exerts from my journal.

Saturday March 22, 2014 Cambridge, England, Regent Hotel room 106

At the Fitzwilliam museum I felt happy, alive and excited by what I was

seeing. It was as if the dread, despair, the darkness, all shut off at once. I noticed it when I walked into the small room with the modern pictures; a Morundi landscape, three Picassos, a Howard Hodgkin, and others including Modigliani. I felt glad to be looking at art with real pleasure and intensity. And I loved that museum. So many surprises and masterpieces like Titian’s Venus And The Lute Player and a Breughel I used to show when I lectured on Art History. I looked at Caneletto in a way I hadn’t previously and photographed many things allowing myself, without thinking, to just be present amongst all that amazing art. And though there were security guards, young women paying only moderate attention, all the work was accessible and I could move within inches of any piece and there were no crowds or barriers and the work felt close and close to the source from where it sprung, in Europe mostly, just a short hop across the channel. Five Poussin paintings done in Rome and bought by a British lord for L2000 and then given, years later, by an heir to the Fitzwilliam. And they were there close at hand and in the next room Monet, Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne, Sisley, Degas and Stanley Spencer painting John Donne Entering Heaven.

There were two Fantin-Latour small studies of everyday object; a cup and saucer, a vase and Monet on the coast painting sea stacks that looked like Newfoundland.

Earlier there were arms; guns and swords, rifles and armor all made with such skill and attention to detail.

And later a few ceramic pieces that made me think about hand-building some
pots back in Newfoundland and calling Deb W. to see  if I could use her kiln.

We were there a few hours and I’d had no idea of what to expect and the constant surprises only added to the joy. Two de De Stael abstract paintings, not very good but present, the confidence of the artist making them work.

After we walked to Granchester mostly through fields and along the River Cam. It was a wonderful walk through classic English countryside, flat and fertile with birds singing and ducks and swans on the water. People were out with kids and dogs, on bikes or running under big Constable skies. It was a fine way to land after the high of the Fitzwilliam. And we ate at The Green Man pub, ancient but happening in the way pubs can happen and Em and I had burgers and Sarah fish cakes and we all had beers and it was such a treat. From there we walked to The Orchard for coffee. Virginia Wolf and her crowd used to hang out there and the Cambridge students will sometimes punt up the river after a formal to have breakfast there still dressed in gowns and tuxedos. We walked back to town after that.

Em is coming over at 8:00 PM and we will figure out dinner. Last night was delicious at a place called Pint  Shop. It was busy with reservations but we got there early and they gave us a table for a few hours. Em and I shared a whole chicken and Sarah had cauliflower and spinach gratin. We drank a bottle of  2009 Corbiere from grapes grown high that was 80% granache and 20% syrah and it felt like it was new an alive. Our server was a Polish woman, training for a body building championship and she was taught with no excess flesh anywhere. From there we went to The Mill, a pub on the river, and that too was a treat and one of the few times I had sat in a pub or a bar and had a drink for a long time. After quitting smoking it became difficult.

Sunday March 23, 2014 Cambridge, England, Regent Hotel room 106

Emmett is 30 today. Born at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto around 3:00AM.

Earlier I had gone to the lounge for a while to smoke a cigarette and watch David Letterman whose guest that night was Bob Dylan. One of his few TV appearances. Much has changed in hospital life and in ours as well. Emmett is now an architect with a Masters from Yale and is currently a fellow at Cambridge working on an MPhil studying the Smithsons and Brutalism in architecture. One of the great wonders in life is one cannot know or anticipate what will happen to their children, who they will become as adults. The child I think has more of an idea, an instinctive game plan not articulated or shared until it actually starts to take shape.

Today we met up at 12:00PM with a visit to the outdoor market and St. John’s College, through the park and over the river to Kettle’s Yard a contemporary art collection. There is a house and a free standing gallery building. We visited the house first which was originally four separate cottages slated to be torn down but recued and renovated and joined together by Jim Ede (1895-1990) where he and his wife lived from 1957-1973. Jim had been a curator at The Tate Museum and he befriended a number of artists while working there including Ben Nicholson and his wife Winifred and he acquired their work and the work of other artists and the house was conceived as place where he and his wife could enjoy the art and share it with the public and in so doing they opened their house to public every afternoon.

It is a special place and the experience moved me deeply in that it touched on ways I had felt many years ago when I was falling in love with visual art and the artist’s way. It was like visiting a person’s house in France who had artists as friends and then getting to know the artists as I did in Vence in 1968. I talked to Em and Sarah after about art and the pure experience of seeing it and being inspired to consider taking that route in life and how the decision had nothing to do with career or money or fame.

Some of this is what I try to get at in THE WAY OF ART.  Today was a reminder. The house full of drawings and sculptures by a young French artist, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who I had not heard of who died young at 27. He had so much promise as could be seen in the spirit and vision of the early drawings he made. (I would encounter him again at The Pompidou in Paris a few days later which sort of confirmed my idea about the quality of his work.)

No one I first met in France was a big name artist. They all just worked at their art and hoped to be able to get by. Kazimer Glaz epitomized for me the essence of an artistic vision making beautiful paintings in tempera and gouache on brown paper bags because he could not afford good paper or canvas and these paintings still hold up today. Jim Ritchie restless and relentlessly making work day in and day out in sculpture and drawing, Roussil, David Logan, Mathew Percival, Eddie Plunkett. The life, the spirit all came back to me today.

The gallery show was mostly Ben and Winifred Nicholson and a couple of friends and once again I was taken with Nicholson’s work and was able to see his vision taking shape and it was a vision of substance and he was courageous in his struggle to break free of convention especially in English painting in England and become the painter of pure elegant abstraction that he became. His work looks so much better in person than in reproduction. The depth is there, the weight. And Winifred, though more conventional, could really paint and had a quirky, personal take on representation.