The Price….

Last night we went to the intimate Marylebone Theatre to be engrossed and moved by Arthur Miller's play ‘The Price’.  This is one of Miller’s less known plays set during the depression and perhaps is best defined by Miller himself who once said - “Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.” The play highlights the price we when we make that mistake!

The play is a drama about two estranged brothers, Victor and Walter Franz, who meet after 16 years to sell their late father's furniture. However it reveals a confronting and long-buried resentment and the true cost of their life choices. 

Victor's sacrifice to care for their father during the Depression is played out against Walter's successful but distant career as a surgeon. It is volatile, loud, intense and moving. 

Overseeing the negotiation is an elderly, wily appraiser, Gregory Solomon, who brings dark humor and wisdom to the emotional battlefield as the brothers' conflicting memories and justifications are revealed. 

His role is taken over in the second half of the play as the brothers express their frustration in the other. 

It is a play that will have an extended season following understandable rave reviews. 

Miller was a playwright of incredible courage and conviction and reflected the personal  and societal tensions that conflict America today. 

I hazard a guess that his plays will be more widely played out on the stage because of its resonance in today’s volatile and valueless world. 

 

David Hockney: A Year in Normandy

Hockney’s new paintings for the Serpentine Gallery reflect his lifelong fascination with looking, “affirming his belief that simple beauty is worth celebrating”.  

It’s an exhibition that at its heart is the environmental cycle  as we now know it but will change over climate change time. The Hockney frieze surrounds the gallery like a ribbon of his time in Normandy. 

It has Hockney’s brush strokes, meanderings  and simple narrative. The drawings are projected from his iPad onto the interior wall of the Serpentine Gallery North like a film; its edits enabling a continuous moving image of winter through spring summer, autumn and back to winter. It’s simple, atmospheric, and is  time lapse journey.

 

Cecily Brown at the Serpentine Gallery

Cecily Brown at the Serpentine Gallery and is known for her ‘vigorous brushwork, vivid colour and dynamic compositions’. 

The works provide ample evidence of her approach plus her love for the outdoors. In fact the gallery is located in amongst the green grass and trees of Kensington Gardens and some of her paintings sit with a view of the outside. 

She works at a scale, with the flashes of brush and of colour with recurring motifs, such as ‘amorous couples, woodland scenes, and uncanny nature walks’. The exhibition responds to early memories of the landscape nd her fascination with children’s book illustrations. The works rely on finding those children tales in amongst the forest and grass  of the outdoors. 

This is her first major solo show of paintings in the UK since her 2005 exhibition and represents her homecoming from New York where she has spent the past thirty years.

 

Call me Trace…

The Tate Modern describes Tracy Emin as ‘one of the most  important contemporary artists of her generation’. Since her Turner Prize nomination of ‘My Bed’  in the 1990’s ‘her disregard for any separation of the personal and the public, along with her commitment to unapologetic self-expression, came to define a historic moment in British culture and global art history’.

The exhibition at the Tate Modern exposes 40 years of her groundbreaking practice alongside new works that include painting, video, textiles, neons, writing, sculpture, and installation, Emin uses the ‘female body as a powerful tool to explore passion, pain, and healing’.

An art critic wrote ‘Don’t come here looking for a good time – you won’t find it. But come looking for pure, unapologetic, undiluted, full-frontal love, grief, heartache and sadness, and you will end up feeling more feelings than you’ve probably felt for years’. Not wrong! 

 

London matters!

 

London flashbacks….

 In 1972 we spent on living in a bedsit in Tufnell Park and enjoying newly made with friendships. We scrounged Camden Market and wandered aimlessly across Hampstead Heath contemplating our futures and living our lives. It was a wonderful time with new made friends who we still have today.