New Painting: I’ve been fiddling with this one for a while. It is based on a picture I took while walking around Hyde Park with Karen and Jerry Fried. I got the napping guy on the bench and the bird done pretty quickly and then got stuck on the background. Maybe I should have done it in a different order. Anyway, the background got to be too complicated and I kept trying to get it right and then finally put the damn thing aside to start anther one. I came back to it, made a few changes and decided to call it a day. Actually the one I’m currently working on is also very detailed. I think I’m going to switch and do something with bigger fields of color after that one is done. Here is the one that is finished:

Geffrye Museum: This museum is right up the road in the Hoxton area of Shoreditch, a fifteen minute walk. We went with Linda and Chris last Saturday. Geffrye was a self-made man who came to London and became an ironmonger and eventually Lord Mayor and head of the Ironmongers Guild. He died in 1714 without a family and left a portion of his large fortune in a trust to provide for an almshouse for retired ironmongers or their widows who were needy. A number of the guilds in the City built almshouses in Shoreditch, but this is the only one that survived. On Saturday, the only part of the structure that still looks like it did originally is open for special tours. In seeing the rooms, you realized that it wasn’t a very cushy deal for those needy ironmongers. They got a room, an allotment of coal and one shirt a year, so the rooms were sparely furnished. Chapel was compulsory and there was a curfew. Eventually, as the number of ironmongers fell, the rooms began to be filled by retired school mistresses or nannies and the like. The rooms become better decorated. (They had such a room decorated as if it was occupied by a woman in the Victorian age.) Eventually, the train line came along, built by the back of the almshouse, and the city reached the formerly bucolic site with a vengeance. By the end of the 1800s, the almshouse was in the midst of such a cesspool of humanity and industry that the residents petitioned to be moved out. Fortunately for them, old Geffrye’s trust still had money in it and they were all moved to Kent or somewhere like that. That left the question of what do with the now former almshouse. All the other ones in the neighborhood had been demolished or repurposed, but this one was saved, although not for the buildings. It was saved because its large gardens were more than 10% of the open space in the borough and the local government bought it to keep the area as a park. It is now a museum with a series of rooms that show how people lived over the centuries and a rear garden, which illustrates the evolution of garden design over the same period. The formal front garden is quite big and is open to the public, which uses it as a park.

Other Thoughts: I occurred to me recently that we have gone through a stretch where the visitors we have had included a number of accomplished artists, all of whom have actually sold paintings. (Karen Fried, Judie’s sister, Linda, and my sister, Sally.) They all work in different mediums and are all talented. They were all very encouraging about my efforts and gave me some good suggestions. In looking back, while having them visit me wasn’t exactly intimidating, I wonder if I actually painted less while they were here. Of course, just having visitors cuts down on my painting time and is otherwise distracting. I do seem to be doing more art right now, for whatever reason.