It is good to have some time out from the old routine and last week we had a couple of days out. Firstly we (me and Little I) went to this place with an old friend. We went initially to see the Matisse papercutouts exhibition. Of course I hadn't read the info properly and it was in fact lithographs of the original papercutouts - but apparently very high quality prints approved by Matisse himself. They were fab, and the colours and clean lines, simple shapes really cheered me up. I don't know why but I felt enriched by seeing these - there is eomthing great about art that I like for purely formal and aesthetic "gut" reactions. I guess this is art I like with my heart rather than my head? I also love the fact that Matisse had the passion and energy to engage in creativity in his old age. There were some images of him using a broom handle to reach his works up on the wall when he was unable to be mobile.
In the picture here is Little I doing her best "photo face" alongside a glimpse of Matisse. and in the top picture she has just discovered the great noise you can make by stamping on art gallery floors. (those are binoculars in her hand - of course a necessary item for gazing at art works)
In the contemporary gallery there was an installation by Sun K Kwak called Untying Space - wow - it was great and I liked it much more than I expected to. She makes huge images on the walls from black masking tape and they flow over bumps, round corners, over light switches etc. They are kind of like a giant splash of black paint or a giant enlarged woodblock print and reminded me a bit of the images you can get by enlarging black and white photos over and over again on a photocopier till you are abstracting the image to a pixelated state. It was a great counterpoint to the Matisses which in their original incarnation were also large scale wall based works and it would be fantastic to see her work juxtaposed or at least in closer proximity to his. Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of it and on the Walsall Art Gallery website the images of her work are not the same as the actual work in Walsall.
We also saw a witty exhibition by Adam Dant - based around alcohol, satire, they are huge pen and ink drawings with amazing details. They made me laugh and made me think too. Then we spent some time playing in the children's gallery - art galleries are much more child friendly than when I was a kid!
Meanwhile at home the dust grows and the fridge was a bit empty -how to be a very bad housewife? Spend the day at the art gallery - much more fun than housework! I have a postscript that as a result of a day out on the wednesday, thursday morning found us in tesco at 8am (yuk!) because I had neglected to buy food for my son's school packed lunch as I was too busy drinking coffee and wandering round the gallery. ooopps
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