One of the things they do here is have periodic Bank Holidays, which create a long weekend. Unlike the U.S., these holiday don’t celebrate any person or group. They are just a day off. We had completely forgotten that this past weekend was a long weekend, so we didn’t make any plans to leave and go to the beach or something. And I had agreed to give Andy a break at New Unity by giving the sermon on Sunday, which made going anywhere impossible anyway. We had fun in London instead of traveling.

David Hockney and Bill Jacklin: We went to the Royal Academy of Arts on Saturday to see the David Hockney Exhibit, “82 Portrait and 1 Still Life”. It is a result of an ongoing project that Hockney is doing. Over the past two or three years, he has been inviting friends and families to sit for him. They each sit in a white chair and he paints them in three days, beginning with a quick charcoal outline. The paintings are all done with acrylics and are quite large, roughly four feet by three feet, so completing a painting in three days is not easy, even for Hockney. The backgrounds started out varied, but quickly change into two colors, which flip, presumably on what they are wearing. The portraits are pretty wonderful individually, but seeing them all in one place is quite incredible. Hockney is amazingly skillful at faces, so much so that it is hard to take your eyes off them. He captures the face, without it being overly realistic. But it is his rendition of the pose and the clothes and hands and feet that really impart a feeling of the subject. (I was happy to see that even Hockney has trouble painting hands and feet, which I find incredibly difficult. One of the early portraits in the series left off the feet, but Hockney decided it was incomplete and never did that again.) His subjects all get to decide what they would wear for the sitting (saying a lot about them), which made you think about what you would wear if you had the chance to sit for him. The one still-life was from a day when someone was supposed to come and didn’t show up. Hockney was all fired up to paint, so he moved the white chair and replaced in with a blue bench with fruit on it and the result is, of course, striking. I’ve included a few samples of the exhibit below, including an excerpt from the catalog which show the process of painting Barry Humphries, but it really doesn’t capture the exhibit. I am now inspired to paint some portraits (but no white chair and probably just head and shoulder shots for me at first).

     

After going through the Hockney exhibit, we decided to take a look at a retrospective of the graphic art done by Bill Jacklin. It was completely different-for one thing it was largely black and white-but it was amazing. This is an artist about whom we knew absolutely noting and we both found his work enchanting. Judie wants to to buy one of his original prints, which it turns out is sort of possible. One of the great things about it from our point of view is that, although he was born in Britain, he was very much a NYC artist and many of his works are from Coney Island or Central Park or Wolman Rink or Grand Central Station. Actually, I think I enjoy discovering a wonderful talent like this as much or more than seeing an incredible exhibit of Calder or O’Keeffe or Hockney. A couple of samples of Jacklin’s stuff follows. He has a technique of spraying oil or turpentine on his engraving block before printing, which creates an etherial kind of effect.

My Sermon/Message: I gave my “sermon”on Sunday, August 28th (at New Unity, they refer to it as a “Message”, since “Sermon” seems too religious). It happens to be the anniversary of the day that we moved to London. I didn’t realize it when I agreed to do it, but it seems appropriate somehow. Rev. Andy was there and did the introductory and concluding stuff, which mean that I only had to do the reading and the sermon. I love the reading, which I excerpted from a TED talk. And my talk was generally about what happens when culture changes and the problems caused when there are winners and losers in a cultural shift. It had a nice structure, although it was hard to really make the point in seven or eight minutes. Everyone seemed to like it and I got a lot of compliments. If you had gotten up at the crack of dawn on the East Coast, you could have watched it live, as New Unity streams the service. If they ever get around to posting the service on the website, I’ll send a link. In the meantime, you could download and read the Reading here and the Sermon here, if you are in the mood.

Notting Hill Carnival: On Monday of the Bank Holiday Weekend, Judie and I went to the Notting Hill Carnival. It sounds like an oxymoron. Who would have thought that such a posh neighborhood would let itself be overrun by a million people furiously drinking Red Stripes and eating jerk chicken by the ton. (I did a little research and it turns out that 50 years ago, when the carnival began, Notting Hill was a West Indian neighborhood that had experienced race riots. Times have changed.) It seemed like every Caribbean person in London was there. It was a mad house and the parade lasts all day since it moves at less than a crawl. When Judie told people at work that we were going to go, they looked askance and said that it was too crowded and dangerous. (And, in fact five people were stabbed on Sunday night, at the end of “Family Day”, and over 450 were arrested over the two days.) But we had fun, despite the mob scene, and left before the crowd became completely drunk and rowdy. A few photos follow: