Brexit Approaches? I am writing this on Friday, as Britain waits, with bated breath, for the PM to come out with his long-awaited renegotiated deal with the EU. Exactly why this Friday is the deadline isn’t clear to me, but I assume it can be extended. It’s been a strange negotiation, partly because it has been so public. Cameron basically announced his demands many months ago and it is clear that he is not going to get everything that he wanted, which will automatically give the euroskeptics grounds to downplay as too weak an agreement that they were never going to like anyway. Britain’s basic position is that we want to be kind of in the EU, so that we can get the benefit of the open market, but without being bound by all the same rules as everyone else. I would imagine that countries like France and the rest of the EU would have like to have told Cameron to stick his proposal where the sun doesn’t shine, but they know that a strong EU needs Britain, so they are engaging in a game of chicken. It appears that the agreement may even be delayed, which is in everyone’s interest, since each country has to convince their populace that they engaged in tough negotiations and emerged with the best agreement they could get.

You can read about the details of what Cameron got in the NY Times or some similar paper, so I won’t bother going over the various sticking points. No matter what he gets, it is hard to imagine that Cameron won’t endorse it as a great deal. He is too committed to remaining in the EU to turn down whatever gets offered. If he does or if there is no agreement, it is all over and Britain will exit this year. But he won’t, so there will be a referendum in June. It is increasingly clear that it will be a wild campaign. A number of Tories are going to jump ship on this issue, including some significant ones, possibly including London’s outgoing Mayor, Boris Johnson, who is thinking of trying to succeed Cameron. Corbyn, who was a euroskeptic as an MP, now appears to be a Brexit opponent. Strange bedfellows. The campaign itself looks like it will be full of scare tactics and probably short on real facts. It will be interesting to see how the whole thing compares with the ongoing Presidential dog and pony show. I think it is going to be close.

Frank Auerbach: Last week, I  went to Tate Britain with Peter and Andrea because they wanted to see the Turners and Andrea wanted to see their collection of paintings by William Blake. Since I was there, I decided to check out their special exhibit, a retrospective of Frank Auerbach. He is one of the great modern English painters and has had his studio in London for decades. He actually chose the paintings for exhibit. The exhibit was organized by decade, starting in the 1960s and each decade had at least one painting of the same area outside his studio. You could really trace his development. I have to admit, I wasn’t all that familiar with his work. I know I’d seen a few of his paintings at various exhibits, but that is different from seeing lots and lots of them all at once. He’s a bit of an expressionist, I guess.

One thing about his works is the sheer amount of paint that he uses. There is something rather thrilling about an artist who is willing to hurl such large amounts of material at the canvas. I was wondering if there is any way for me to experiment with that. But it is hard to get volume with acrylics, so I would probably have to switch to oils. They seem to sell structural paste for acrylics, so maybe I’ll see if that it a way around it.

“The Meeting”: On Thursday evening, we went to the Hampstead Theatre to see a play in their little, black box theatre. This theatre presents more experimental works than the main stage. “The Meeting” was a pretty good work in most respects. Each of the four characters was well developed and there were a number of good scenes. But somehow, it didn’t quite hold together as a play. The plot revolved around the negotiation of a business contract (fascinating for Judie perhaps, but inherently boring for most people) in which the good old boy representative of the other company was replaced at the last minute by a woman. It’s a concept with real potential and you can think of a number of ways that such a premise could go. But this play lurched around on this theme, never quite deciding what sort of woman this was. It was too bad, because I thought the performances were very good and the three male characters were wonderfully quirky. It was fun to watch, but ultimately not fulfilling.

A Painting: I took a photo last September of a group of women waiting for a bus on Whitechapel. It seemed like a good idea for a painting. But I could never get it to look any good. So I would just give up and put it aside, come back to it, get disgusted and put it aside, come back again, etc. This has been going on for 3-4 months. I stopped trying to duplicate the photo months ago, which helped. An experienced artist probably would have just thrown the thing out and moved on, but I was too stubborn. I took it out again while Andrea and Peter were visiting and now–well, at least it doesn’t stink any more. I am declaring it finished so I can stop working on it.