GARDEN WALKS, GOGH WALKS, GOD WALKS

Back in the day I had a girlfriend with a flat in Brighton, so on many a weekend I’d go down 

there from London. I liked the sea and the Volks Railway, but mostly I liked the secondhand book and record shops.

         And one weekend the girlfriend said ‘Let’s go on a day trip to Sheffield Park and Gardens,’ which is less than 20 miles from Brighton. ‘And what will we do there?’ I asked, and she said ‘You know, walk around.’  At the time I couldn’t think of anything worse.  Walking in gardens seemed so middle-aged and boring.  I didn’t say no and I didn’t complain once we got there, and although I don’t remember much about it, I'm sure I didn't enjoy myself much.  Though I do vaguely remember this bridge.

 

Now, of course, I find that walking in gardens is a perfectly good way to spend time.  This is Westbury Court in Gloucestershire where I was last month:

 

And it so happens I’ve been reading Lesley Chamberlain’s book A Shoe Story about Van Gogh and Heidegger.  The latter is likely to remain a closed book, but Vincent is OK by me, even though I had no idea he was much of a walker.  How ignorant I was.  Here is Chamberlain on van Gogh: ‘early in his life van Gogh associated walking very closely with his artistic practice …. He believed in nature as both his moral and artistic authority and to walk was to put himself physically in touch with that wisdom’ and she quotes van Gogh as saying in one of his many letters to Theo, ‘Our goal is “Walking with God.’’' Rather an overambitious goal I’d say, though this is not my area of expertise.

 

And I was lead to this picture which I’d never seen before, titled A Woman Walking in a Garden.  It’s all over the internet, though no two reproductions show it with the same colours.

 

Life being as it is, I spent last Sunday walking around the Secret Gardens of Mistley.  They weren’t as secret as all that – there was a map and everything. Most of the gardens were small and domestic and not at all grand, which is OK with me.  

 

And in one of them, the one shown above, there was a table full of used books for sale.  What a haul – Beckett, Pynchon and Shrigley for a total of 3 quid.  It’s the kind of thing that makes walking in gardens worthwhile.

 

Here’s Beckett: ‘For as I have always said, First learn to walk, then you can take swimming lessons.’

 

Here’s Pynchon: ‘Death is not a real outcome, the hero always walks out of the heart of the explosion, sooty-faced but grinning.’

 

I can’t find any specific utterance by Shrigley about walking, so here's this picture, which does show a stick figure walking:

 

 

BOYS OF VARIOUS CENTURIES

Half a lifetime ago I was, very briefly, a security guard/gallery attendant at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.   They’d taken on extra staff for a big Post-Impressionist exhibition. First thing in the morning, you had to be at your place ten minutes before the public were allowed in, so for that very brief period of time you found yourself alone pacing up and down in a gallery of, say, priceless Van Goghs.  And as you paced it was very possible to imagine that you were some kind of supervillain, and these Van Goghs were yours and yours alone.  And funnily enough something very slighty similar happened to me at the weekend in Los Angeles.

I went to the Parker Gallery to see an exhibition by Duncan Hannah, top quality painter, and author of a newish memoir titled Twentieth-Century Boy which is getting masses of attention, and according to its publisher is a “rollicking and vividly immediate account of his life amid the city's glamorous demimondes in their most vital era as an aspiring artist, roaring boy, dandy, cultural omnivore, and far-from-obscure object of desire.” And if you can’t trust Penguin Random House, who can you trust?

I checked a map – the gallery was walking distance from where I live, maybe a forty minute walk in each direction.  Easy.  On the other hand, the map showed the gallery apparently to be in the middle of a very posh suburban enclave, the kind of place that I’m pretty sure isn’t zoned for commercial enterprises.  Ah well, that would be interesting in itself.

I checked the weather and it promised to be warm though not punishingly so, but I set off walking and discovered the forecast was wrong.  It wasn’t just warm but scorching, and by the time I got to the gallery I felt like a mad, sweaty dog.      Incidentally, Duncan Hannah these days looks like such a cool customer I can’t imagine he ever sweats at all:

Doesn't look as though he perspired all the much in earlier years either:

PHOTO BY FERNANDO NATALICI

And yes the Parker Gallery is indeed in a suburban enclave, in fact it’s inside a mock Tudor mansion, and the casual gallery visitor would surely be deterred by the prospect of walking up that driveway and knocking on the door, which I suppose is the point. 

But I am made of sterner stuff.   I went up, rang the front door bell, and a very pleasant art gallery girl let me in, and I saw the Duncan Hannah exhibition which was terrific.  

I was all alone, there were no other visitors, and I was able to recreate my Van Gogh moment, walking through the rooms at the Parker pretending these Hannah paintings were mine, all mine.  It was rather a good feeling.

Hannah’s paintings are often both narrative and figurative (a tricky furrow to plow in this day and age), all calm surface but with a hint of inscrutable menace.  Something not quite right may have just happened, or may be about to happen but you don’t know what or why.  This is a particular favorite titled “Man Wrongfully Accused.”

A fellow traveler tells me that the setting is almost certainly Finchingfield, in Essex, and he's surely right, but I don't know what significance that has.

You'll note the absence of cars in the painting, but Hannah is really good with classic cars, such as this Karmann Ghia:

Want to see an old twentieth-century picture of your scribe with his Karmann Ghia? –  Course you do.  (NB I'm well aware that I was no Duncan Hannah looks-wise, but then, few are).

I had a vague plan that after seeing the exhibition I might walk on and have a look at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown house, which was not a million miles away, but it was too damn hot, and the route to the house was all up hill, so I went the other way, and I saw this, perhaps the most rigorously minimalist garden I've seen in a good long time.  Painterly.