At the Tate

This week I've been in London for a couple of days, staying with the First Born. I went with a friend who has visited New Mexico and raved about the experience and our visit was to see the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition at Tate Modern before it closes on Sunday. What a FABULOUS show! It is so good to go not expecting too much and then to be totally swept off your feet. I have only known her work through reproduction and with some other artists, at the Hopper exhibition, for example, the actual paint surface or some other element was sometimes a disappointment. Not this time, from start to finish the work was sublime. 

The exhibition was very intelligently hung, just enough information, wonderful quotes, interesting photographic back-up. And what a handsome woman. 

No photography was allowed, so my images are taken only from a postcard and the small programme that came with my ticket. There were three very covetable paintings of New York made while she was living in an apartment on the 30th floor of a skyscraper - a bird's eye view!

There were many photographs, those of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, like small, muted wood prints and the contrasting large, crisp images of the landscape by Ansel Adams. 

Absolutely glorious - very beautiful paintings of a very beautiful world - now I want to visit New Mexico!

To recover from all this excitement we went for cocktails to Freres et Fils. It was rather like being in a Manet painting.

Janet and the F B had cocktails, but I needed to calm down and had camomile tea! The young waiter looked after us magnificently, things kept arriving at our table - salted nuts, olives and cheese puffs. "You've looked after us so well, we'll come here every night," I told him.

The following day we went to Tate Britain on the first day of the Paul Nash exhibition, our heads still full of the previous day.

How very English it looked, and all the images and references well understood. There were some lovely surprises, a painting of the vernal equinox owned by the Queen, where the sky is divided equally into day and night. And again, lovely quotes. Talking about the landscape in his painting, 'Wood on the Downs' he describes it as a place 'where you might meet anything from a polecat to a dryad.'

We had a walk through the work of the Turner Prize nominees. Don't get me started on conceptual art.

We came home on the train absolutely exhausted!

Earlier in the month I visited two local exhibitions in Bath, a city famous for it's flower displays!

First a drawing exhibition.

Himself submitted an old college drawing.(Centre left below.)

Secondly a sculpture show 

with interesting things to say about drawing.