9.00 am. The full extent of terrorist attacks in Paris was now evident. Clearly this marks a new and dangerous escalation of IS’s operations. It has now come to our door. On the streets of London — and today was the Lord Mayor of London’s Day – armed police were very much in evidence. How much more so in response to yesterday’s atrocities is impossible to tell. The armed forces were out in great numbers too, but strictly on parade.
10.30 am. I attended Lanyon’s Soaring Flight, an exhibition of his gliding-based paintings at The Courtauld Gallery:
From ‘The Black Notebook’ (10 Mar. 2015 – , 46-47):
Silent Coast – never as blue in reality as I remember it, or as it’s often reproduced / a sharp turn in flight – like the personal abandon of sexual ecstasy / DeKooning – an ever present influence in L’s heavily gestural works / but L is more object directed / Movement made still / but what were those ‘feelings’ L was intent on expressing? / a detached stillness-silence / abstraction using local colour predominantly / landscape as a vehicle for, stimulus of, emotion (as in the 19th-century Sublime) / aerial views – but the suggestion of a profound depth between the artist’s position and the ground / L nevertheless remained loyal to the flatness of the support / caption interpretations are often too poetic — too literal and specific / the theme of the crucifixion occurs periodically throughout L’s oeuvre / the landscape seen and experienced as dynamic and mobile / the glider was a much an artistic tool as L’s brush / the movement of the glider in the air becomes the movement of the artist before the support and of the brush across it / there are mythic connotations present — metaphors for something grander than the ostensible subject / one art historian mistakenly describes the direction of a brushstroke in one painting; you can see the error, if you’ve ever made a brush mark like it / art historians should make art; then they wouldn’t make such mistakes
Bridget Riley: Learning from Seurat was also on show. Just one room; but enough to demonstrate how a past painter can be a later painter’s teacher. One can learn a great deal from breaking into and assimilating (not copying) the principles of another artist’s work. She distils from Seurat a pure, optical phenomenon. Her paintings are very ‘loud’, but without being assertive. Their precision of execution reflects a corresponding exactitude of intellect:
Like Agnes Martin’s works, Riley’s are beautiful but never pretty. Both painters could achieve in one work what lesser artists do in an entire exhibition. Riley’s pictures are without fixity – shifting, oscillating, adapting. The visual equivalent of a pulsating drone.
12.10 pm. Forward to Oxford Street and a period of consumer consultation at a major department store. 1.40 pm. On, then, to the Duke of York Theatre on St Martin’s Lane to see Claire Van Kampen’s Fairinelli and the King:
This was something of a ‘must see’, The only tickets obtainable were for standing at the very back and top of the theatre. A snip at £10. The pace, intelligence, wit, inventiveness, and quality of actors (fronted by Mark Rylance), kept one’s attention on the play and away from any physical discomfort endured. Like last night’s fiasco, the central theme was mental incapacity. However, the playwright and Rylance achieved more in the first two minutes of this play than the other had done in its entirety:
5.10 pm. A search for a place to eat. It would have been advisable to book in advance. After a short run-around, I secured an acceptable Cumberland sausage and mash potato at a pub close to Tavistock Street. 7.45 pm. Back at the flat, the landlord introduced himself. He’s studying theology en route for clerical training in the Anglican Church.