Taking Time Out
In natures rhythm I awake as the moon sets and the sun is rising.
By 8 am. I am in seat 15, on the coach. The stranger to my left in 14, by 9 becomes my friend.
A coffee stop at 10.15am., and at 11 we are with other granulating vehicles, slipping the M.10’s narrow hourglass, through swelling suburbia, towards the mound of London’s art scene.
Arrival.
12pm. Country folk are shelled like peas from our protective coach, out into the harsh rut and thrust of city traffic among bag toting visitors.
I stand ruffled and pigeon toed in Trafalgar Square awkwardly awaiting my friend.
A song drifts over above the coloured medley of people, busy din and water fountains. The singer a diminutive figure, dressed in bright blue stiletto’s with an ultramarine and black dress and long white gloves.
Easily enchanted, I’m captive, joining her audience beneath the backdrop of The National Gallery.
Her piercing operatic octaves acoustically dissolve the huge stone pillars projecting her voice.
Then the Blue Bird stops singing, wraps her talent in a black shawl, gathers up her portable radio orchestra and money hat, leaves, bowing out to pattering applause and the flapping of wings.
Meeting.
My mobile phone vibrates… ‘I’m here’. - ‘So am I’- ‘I’m by the pillars where are you?’- ‘I’m at the front.’ ‘Ah!’-
‘I’m up the steps’. ‘Yes.’ There is the zooming together of eyes locking onto each other, mobiles clamped to ears.
Smiles. Call ended.
A warm embrace at the bottom of the steps, the comfort of familiarity, and delight in the planned anticipation of shared time.
Exhibitions.
David Hockney’s Portraits. Time becomes suspended, special tensions hover between couples, especially Mr. and Mrs. Clark. It’s a familiar painting but larger and more luminous than expected. All these earlier works appear radiant in a glowing Californian light. We share insights in the busy gallery, other people are dark shifting silhouettes, and I overhear comments and familiar questions of, how long a painting may have taken.
Its significance to artists is bewildering but important to others. I wonder and move on.
Decisive pen and inks, etchings and tenderly observed studies of his mother. Some later thinly worked self portraits.
Lunch.
We leave the confined building; escape its crowded marble floors for the cool park. On the way buy Sushi for lunch.
Beneath a canopy of Plain Trees find an empty seat. A solid London bench, it has heavy separating wooden arms. People spacers. Decide bench-mark boundaries are symbolic in cities, like walls dividing flats permit cultural diversity, poverty and wealth.
Seating like this is enforcing respect for boundaries.
But we lean across, share, dip rice bundles in Tamari. Laughing, we experience the green Wasabi kick. Its shocking blast, a ‘Devil’s Dip’ ride to the nasal passages.
Velazquez.
I am eager eyed, feast on the sumptuous sensuality, joy and intensity of vision. Velazquez’s skilful painterly expressing of flesh and fabric, brass pots and egg shells.
A wealth of deceptive simplicity.
In the paintings I see a profound respect for people and the everyday, through his art expanding it to become extra-ordinary.
Rooms full of powerful pictures speaking to me from over 400 years.
Why do people think time so important, a way to asses value perhaps?
I feel art can be created outside of a time framework. This is one of the pleasures within the discipline; not to be dominated by the dial, the flat face of 9 to 5.
I imagine at moments when Velazquez, Michelangelo or Leonardo made their art, an energising sun was luminous within the powerhouse of their creative being and they were without shadows.
Time stepped aside for them, put its hands together and prayed at their feet.
Their art is a living shadow stretching infinitely. The artist’s inner light is revealed for all.
Once laid down it is immense, it has no boundaries and will not be measured or contained by time.
Return.
Am I richer for this journey, yes?
Returning, I witness the parallel of still-green fields, the flit-metallic trading of passing cars and tinny glances through glass.
Visually a bit overwhelmed, I understand why drowning minds grab out for the yard-stick mast of time.
And over the engine hum think I can hear the incidental Opera Blue Bird sing.