'Walter Sickert' at Tate Britain

Tate currently has its first major exhibition of works by Sickert in 60 years at Tate Britain. I don't know much about him at all so this was a good way to find out. He had a long career, working from the 1880s to his death in 1942 so he lived and painted through the major art movements of the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. He worked in the studios of both Whistler and Degas and looks to have been particularly influenced by Degas, especially in the subject matter of his paintings. 

The first room of the exhibition is full of rather sombre self-portraits but I quite liked this self-portrait of Sickert as 'The Servant of Abraham' (1929) based on a photo of himself shown next to the painting. His palette for most of his career seems to have been rather dull and, apparently, Degas encouraged him to expand into richer colours.

I much prefer colour so noticed his 'Brighton Pierrots' (1915) straight away with its much richer palette and glowing colours. The costumes of the pierrots, the dusty pink suits, the colourful houses and empty deckchairs all combine to make this a colourful and mysterious painting. Degas had a fascination with music halls and cabarets and Sickert seems to have picked this up as well. Beside the pierrots is 'The Trapeze' (1920) with the vast expanse of canvas tent with the small figure of the trapeze artist about to jump and fly. I immediately thought of 'Miss La La' by Degas and thought this is Sickert's version of Miss La La.

Sickert seems to have had a fascination with Dieppe and Venice where he seems to have returned time and again to paint, as well as with Paris and London. There were quite a few cityscapes of those cities and a room full of the facades of cathedrals. I liked this one 'The Facade of St Jaques' (1902) with it's dramatic light effects as the sun hits the front of the cathedral leaving the street level in shade. I liked the detail of having a sign for a restaurant in the painting because, of course, wherever you go there is always a restaurant or cafe beside a cathedral. Sickert rarely painted the streets of London but I liked this one of the front windows of a drapers shop, 'Easter' (1928), named after the easter bonnets filling the shop window. 

Another painting that called to me from across the room was 'Bathers, Dieppe' (1902) with its vast expanse of sea and the people in their colourful bathing costumes. It reminded me of Sorolla's beach scenes with the excited waves and then I noticed there is no beach. Or sky. It's an odd composition in a way, seemingly focused solely on the middle ground. I like the sea and the many different colours in the sun and shadow as the waves gather and then crash on the shore. I couldn't help but wonder about the group in the black swimming costumes, presumably friends or workers on an outing, and wondered what they might've though about the men wading into the sea in their bright, stripy costumes (possibly the workers' bosses?). 

The final room of the exhibition was full of paintings Sickert did from photographs, including photos in newspapers. He painted a lovely 'Portrait of Degas in 1885' (1928) and painted famous people of the time from photos as well as significant events. These paintings were all in much brighter colours and the paint seems to have been thinned to provide a light covering on the canvas. Despite the brightness of the paintings, the one that touched me was 'The Miner' (1935-6) painted from a press cutting at the time which was displayed in a case nearby showing a miner kissing his wife as he returns to daylight after being on strike underground to shut the pit down. It looks grubby and drab and he carries a water jug under his right arm, other arm round his wife pulling her close. It's close-cropped and that emphasises the power of the image. 

And here is the painting of Degas.

Exhibitions Unblogged

I've been very bad at blogging this year, especially about some excellent exhibitions I've seen, so here is a catch-up bloggie to get them into the Plastic Bag. 

'Durer's Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist' at the National Gallery

Follow Durer on his journeys to Italy and the Low Countries through drawings, paintings and prints, the architecture and the strange animals he saw in zoos.  

'Surrealism Beyond Borders' at Tate Modern

I always think of surrealism as a European/American thing so who knew there was an active group of surrealists in Cairo and a thriving scene in Mexico. The exhibition does what it promises and shares the surrealist experience from around the world.

'Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty' at Dulwich Picture Gallery

A real eye-opener in how to make prints. I still can't get my head around what I saw were really prints, even after watching a video of how she made the prints. Astonishing and beautiful. "No rules".

'Van Gogh: Self Portraits' at the Courtauld Gallery

A small but lovely exhibition of how Van Gogh saw himself throughout his painting career and how his painting developed.

'Virtual Veronese' at the National Gallery

Put on the virtual reality headset and you head back to the 15th century and see a Veronese painting in the chapel it was originally painted for, a very strange experience.

'Life Between Islands' at Tate Britain

A great selection of paintings, photographs and installations by artists with Caribbean heritage but associated with the UK

'Raphael' at the National Gallery

A wonderful romp through the artistic career of Raphael ending with his time in Rome before he died in 1520. Painting, drawings, bronzes, prints, designs for tapestries and even his architecture works. 

'Beyond Bloomsbury: Life, Loves and Legacy' at York Art Gallery

Lots of portraits of and by the Bloomsbury group of artists, forever painting each other, plus some lovely still lifes, a sampling of the Omega Workshop works and the ongoing legacy of Bloomsbury.

Plastic Bag Awards 2021

2021 has been an odd year, yet again, and continues to be so. Between official lockdowns and self-imposed lockdowns when the government wasn't doing its prime objective of protecting its citizens, I managed to get out and see and do some things over the year. The categories are, again, abbreviated to make sure there are enough contenders to make it worthwhile convening the judging panel, but here they are, the Baggies of 2021! 

Best Theatre (Drama and Dance)

I only saw one drama this year but several dance productions. The nominees are:

'The Normal Heart' @ The National Theatre
'Romeo & Juliet' @ The Royal Opera House
'The Midnight Bell' @ Sadler's Wells
'L'Heure Exquise' @ The Linbury at the Royal Opera House
'Curated by Carlos' @ Sadler's Wells

'The Normal Heart' was the only play I saw this year and, while it's an important work, it's not a great drama. It was wonderful to see Alessandra Ferri dance twice over the autumn, especially dance with Carlos Acosta, I also saw the ballet that made me fall in love with the art form with my original Romeo, Steven McRae on his return to the stage after his injury. But the dance work that made me sit up and pay attention was the new work from Matthew Bourne, 'The Midnight Bell', telling stories of the seedy side of Soho between the wars. I'm looking forward to seeing it again one day.

The winner is 'The Midnight Bell' by Matthew Bourne at Sadler's Wells.

Best Exhibition

I managed to see a few good exhibitions over the summer and autumn, with all major galleries open and the Courtauld finally re-opened after a three-year restoration project in November (and it's looking good). The nominees are:

'The Making of Rodin' @ Tate Modern
'Sensing the Unseen' @ The National Gallery
'Sophie Taeuber-Arp' @ Tate Modern
'Poussin and the Dance' @ The National Gallery
'Durer's Journeys' @ The National Gallery

There have been some great exhibitions this year that gallery curators will have been working on for several years but fewer people than expected will have seen them due to the plague. That's unfortunate but those of us lucky enough to see them are very grateful.

Who knew that Rodin made naked models of his works to get the musculature and stance right before adding clothes? Who guessed that Durer made sketches from his travels around Europe to incorporate into his paintings? There's a lot to learn from exhibitions. I didn't expect to like the Poussin exhibition but I did, seeing his graceful paintings of dancers and it was a joy to discover Sophie Taeuber-Arp, a colour master I'd never heard of. 

But the Baggie goes to 'Sensing the Unseen' at the National Gallery, a digital and interactive exploration of Jan Gossaert's 'Adoration of the Kings'. Not only was this a great painting to explore but it was perfect for this experimental exhibition of different ways of looking at it, one of my favourite paintings in the collection.

Best Installation

This year I've split off installations from exhibitions since they are, essentially, different things, different ways of experiencing art. The nominees are:

'Rupture No 1: blowtorching the bitten peach' by Heather Phillipson @ Tate Britain
'Infinity Mirror Rooms' by Yayoi Kusama @ Tate Modern
'Forest for Change' @ Somerset House
'In Love With The World' by Anicka Yi @ Tate Modern

This has been a fine year for installations in London and I admit to wanting a holiday cottage in Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms. I loved the 'Forest' in the stone courtyard of Somerset House and I want to adopt one of the alien creatures floating round the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, but the winner is Heather Phillipson at Tate Britain.

This is a fabulous installation that should be called 'The Great All-Seeing God of a Thousand Eyes' and I can't help but gawp at it as I walk through and experience it. It's a sound and vision experience and occupies the central galleries of the Tate. It's fabulous.

Best Face Mask

The pandemic went on from 2020 into 2021 and more places started selling masks since the need continued. Cressida Bell produced a 'Fireworks' mask and the V&A Museum produced different William Morris designed masks (I bought a green one), but the award goes to the Tate that produced a fabulous mask based on the 'Punjabi Rockers' work by Chila Kumari Singh Burman. I bought two.  

And that's it, the reduced Plastic Bag Awards for 2021. Here's hoping we can get closer to normal next year. 

'Rupture No 1: blowtorching the bitten peach' by Heather Phillipson at Tate Britain

Tate Britain has re-opened and there's a grand new installation by Heather Phillipson to experience. Heather's title is 'Rupture No 1: blowtorching the bitten peach' but I prefer mine: The All-Seeing Great Horned God Of A Thousand Eyes.' My title is more descriptive and very apt for those wishing to worship him and partake of the visions and wisdom in his inner sanctum. 

The God resides in the central halls of Tate Britain in a glow of changing colours and mysteries. First up are millions of video screens built into piles of rock salt (probably previous offerings) featuring some of the God's eyes, thick ropes descending from the ceiling, speakers dotted around to feed us wisdom in random sounds and lights changing colours. And then you see the Great Horned God standing tall, almost touching the ceiling. He's a God for the seasons, covered in sheets of newspapers to keep him up to date and current. 

If you walk between his legs you can see his priests involved in sacred mysteries around the holy pool of water and, if you're lucky, you can go into the inner sanctum to see the altar and witness the glowing prophecies from the God's ecstasies. If you're very lucky, you will emerge into daylight again a changed person. The Great Horned God is generous.

Do I need to mention that I loved this installation and let my mind go wandering in all the shapes and colours and textures and lights? I shall return to worship at the feet of the God.

'Turner's Modern World' at Tate Britain

Tate Britain holds the national collection of Turner paintings so it's fitting that its latest exhibition focuses on Turner. The core of the exhibition shows Turner's paintings reflecting the changing world, from the pastoral idyll of previous years to the mechanised world and steam engines that led to where we are today. Something I'd never thought about before is that for the first half of Turner's life Britain had been at war with other countries, as one of the signs pointed out, and that's bound to affect the type of art produced at the time. And it did, with drawings and paintings of forges making canon and weapons. steam rising and flames flaring, warships at sea, storms and shipwrecks. There's a lot going on in this exhibition.

I was quite surprised at the range of media Turner used, primarily watercolour, gouache and oils, mixing his media to experiment with effects. It was also quite exciting to see some of his small sketchbooks on display with his delicate little drawings and studies. I always find it fascinating to see artists' sketchbooks, to see their doodles and random drawings of things that caught their eye or playing around with different compositions. 

Turner was born in 1775 and entered the Royal Academy in 1789 at the very young age of 14. That is, of course, the year of the French Revolution which must've been an influence on his thinking. The Academy taught classical drawing and discouraged depicting modern subjects, preferring to see history paintings as the true artist's subject. He later went on to become professor of perspective at the Academy in 1807. I was quite taken with this small painting of 'Edinburgh, from Carlton-Hill' which shows the city in transition as it expands and grows, in which he used graphite and watercolour. 

I also liked his larger painting, 'The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory'. There's so much going on in this painting and at the still centre is the death of Nelson as the French navy surrenders at Trafalgar. It's a bit jingoistic but that was the state of the country at the time with the death of a hero as he achieved a great victory. 

I quite like the detail of the title putting the viewer in a specific place to watch the scene. I also like the complicated composition, with waves reaching into the air to mingle with the smoke of gunpowder, sails billowing from various ships, showing the complex mess of a sea battle in which sailors are battling the wind and waves as well as the opposition. And the tiny figures of the seamen, dwarfed by their ships.

Turner took a different approach a decade later when he painted 'The Field of Waterloo', rather than showing signs of martial victory and jubilation he shows a more realistic view of the aftermath of war, with piles of bodies and women searching for their menfolk. The dramatic lighting and billowing smoke add to the effect. When the painting went on tour (as happened back then) it was accompanied by a line of poetry from Byron, 'friend and foe in one red burial blent'. 

Turner also painted more 'domestic' scenes of the small events of our lives, such as 'A Country Blacksmith Disputing upon the Price of Iron, and the Price Charged to the Butcher for Shoeing his Pony'. Again, a lovely descriptive title for a painting of various characters doing things. It is also a comment on the costs of war to ordinary people as prices increase to cover the burdens of extra taxes to cover the costs of war, in this case, on iron.

Continuing with social commentary a room of the exhibition is given over to paintings considered to be potentially upsetting to visitors, with a sign at the doorway reading, 'Content Guidance. Artworks in this room depict human suffering and the deaths of enslaved people.' A timely reminder that slavery wasn't abolished until 1807 and 1833 in the overseas colonies and territories.

The next room considered some of Turner's 'biggies' , or at least big to me since they are normally in the National Gallery and I've seen them many times, 'The Fighting Temeraire' and 'Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway'. I don't know why but I quite love these two paintings, maybe familiarity, and I've attempted to copy 'Rain, Steam and Speed'. I love looking for the hare racing ahead of the train - and I don't always see him - and the boats on the river below the bridge. It's an astonishing painting in many ways, a magnificent experiment in trying to capture atmospheric effects.

Before going into the final room I noticed two small watercolours, 'Shields, on the River Tyne' and 'Newcastle' from 1823 when he was doing his series of the 'Rivers of England'. They're lovely little paintings but the locations are unrecognisable today. The sign beside the 'Shields' painting notes that the keelmen worked round the clock to load coal onto the boats to provide the power for Empire before becoming victims to the mechanisation of the process. The curator has clearly never heard the song 'Cushy Butterfield' sung by a brokenhearted keelsman in Gateshead who loves our Cushy.

I visited this exhibition on, by chance, the first day after lockdown at the start of December and the gallery was almost empty so I had the joy of walking into several empty rooms, just me and the art rather than the usual crowds. It was like that in the final room of the exhibition, just me to wander round the art and the guard sitting in the doorway. I was just lucky to already have a ticket for the day but I assume it got busier over December before the current lockdown.

The final rooms contain two paintings hung side by side just as they were when first exhibited. There is 'War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet', a stark painting of Napoleon in exile, and 'Peace: Burial at Sea', a darker painting of Turner's friend, the painter David Wilkie's burial at sea after dying of typhoid. It's a very dramatic painting with black sails on the ship since Wilkie wasn't allowed to be buried on dry land. It's a very dramatic painting and very powerful when you see it right in front of you. He was obviously a good friend.

And there you have it, the biggest exhibition of Turner's paintings for a long time, all on the theme of reflecting the changing world and society he lived in. I was very lucky to visit when I did, when it was so empty so I could enjoy the paintings without crowds. I hope the Tate extends the run of the exhibition to take into account the lockdowns since I'd love to visit again. If you can, it's well worth a visit.

Favourite Paintings: 'Laus Veneris' by Sir Edward Burne-Jones

I first saw 'Laus Veneris' in 1976 at the Laing Gallery in Newcastle. I last saw it in 2018 at the exhibition of Burne-Jones' works at Tate Britain. It was the painting featured on the posters and on the cover of the catalogue. It's based on a poem by Swinburne in which Venus looses her love and here she sits, all languid and love-lorn, being entertained by her maids while knights ride past outside and are seen through the window. It's incredibly decorative and full of details, just look at that tapestry in the background.

Venus may be languid and a goddess but she has very poor posture and I can't help but tut. She's destined for a bad back one of these days. The next time I'm in Newcastle I'll go to the Laing and give her a talking to.

Aubrey Beardsley at Tate Britain in a mask

The Tate galleries re-opened on 27 July and there's Art to see, timed entry by ticket, masks and social distancing, guards in visors and ticket office now behind perspex screens. All as expected really. The Aubrey Beardsley exhibition has been extended due to the lockdown so I wandered over to Tate Britain last Wednesday. I don't know why but I expected a relatively small exhibition, not an exhibition that fills the normal exhibition space downstairs.

I suspect that most people who visit galleries know the name of Aubrey Beardsley and can recognise his distinctive and stylised drawings and that's as far as my knowledge of him goes. A late Victorian who moved in the same circles of Oscar Wilde and illustrated Wilde's 'Salome' as well as other works of the time. Something I didn't know is that he died at the age of 25 - he produced an awful lot of works in his short life. Or that Edward Burne-Jones (the Pre-Raphaelite painter) was his mentor for a time. There's a lot to learn in this exhibition.

We see his early works and a self-portrait from when he was 19 years old. We see some of his drawings of the Arthurian legends and 'Morte d'Arthur', all very stylised and decorative reflecting the artistic fashions of the time. Part of me wished he'd used colour rather than the black/white greyscale he used. He really seems to have liked drawing with black ink and ink washes and it makes for a very effective image. I actually have no idea if they had coloured ink back then but it's a lovely medium to use and is very flexible.

He produced some very delicate line drawings, such as his drawing of Sir Percival seeing the Holy Grail (below). I wonder how many 'mistakes' he made with his lines - or if he made any? Maybe he didn't and he was that good with his pen.

Then there are drawings of androgynous people in flowing robes, like this drawing from the 'Salome' series. This is supposed to be John and Salome confronting each other, almost in mirrored poses, Salome differentiated since her clothing is a bit more elaborately decorated. Throughout the history of painting John is usually shown wearing furs or very plain, simple clothes, but Beardsley puts him in this rather elaborate robe with a careful hair-do. That's what artists do, they create the image and that image tells a story as much as the story behind the painting or drawing. An elaborate robe fit the aesthetic of the time so that's how he's dressed.

Another thing I didn't know was that Beardsley was also a book editor as well as contributing drawings and illustrations to various books and journals. This is a cover he drew for a book he also edited, 'The Yellow Book'. The actual drawing on white paper is on the wall beside the glass case that holds this copy of 'The Yellow Book'. A masked woman and man and a tall candle. What's that all about then? I have no idea but I like it.

Coming towards the end of the exhibition and my eye was caught by this drawing for the title page of an edition of 'Volpone' by Ben Johnson (a contemporary of Shakespeare). I've only seen this play performed once, back in 1978 when the play was on the syllabus for the English Literature 'A' Level. I'd love to see it performed again. Maybe Shakespeare's Globe will put it on one day.

The penultimate room is a small, slightly darkened room with a sign at the door warning about the explicit images inside that might upset those of a delicate disposition. Naturally, I just walked in and took photos of the rudest drawings I saw, both illustrations for scenes from 'The Lysistrata', an ancient Greek play by Aristophanes. If you've read this far then I'm pretty sure you know what the play is about so let's just say the women of the city withheld their sexual favours from the men with the obvious frustrations that leads to for the men.

The final room was essentially a tributes and influences room, showing Beardsley's influences down the years in paintings, drawing, cartoons and record covers, including the Beatles' 'Revolver'. 

The safety measures worked fine, with people queuing outside the exhibition, nicely distanced, but then, as soon as people got through the door, it became a bit of a scramble, with far too many people in the first room, more distanced in the second and so on. I moved on quickly. All in all, it's a good exhibition and well worth visiting (I might visit again later in the run). It was nice to see the range of Beardsley's work over such a short life.  

William Blake at Tate Britain

The big exhibition at Tate Britain is all about William Blake, the artist, poet, printer and mystic who was largely overlooked in his lifetime but now has almost mythic status. Born in the mid 1700s and working through into the early 1800s, he predates the Romantic period but is related to it. Blake doesn't really fit comfortably within any particular movement and he stands largely on his own. That does him no harm at all but does present challenges to curators of exhibitions in trying to present 'this is Blake'.

We all know some Blake. You might say 'who?' but you've heard 'Jerusalem', Blake's great poem set to music, and most people will have heard of 'Tyger, tyger burning bright in the forests of the night'. I bought a replica copy of his 'Songs of Innocence and Experience' nearly 40 years ago and that introduced me to Blake's art as well as his poetry since his original books were fully illustrated.

The exhibition is full of pages from his books with his tiny spiderish writing and lovely illustrations. There are lots of editions of his books in glass cases, both small and very large, lots of prints in black and white and in colour, full size plates and paintings but nothing large because he didn't produce large works. That's both a joy and a problem for the exhibition.

Since the vast majority of the exhibits are relatively small, probably averaging about A4 size, then it means there are a lot of exhibits. It also means that you need to get quite close to see them properly and that's a problem in a busy exhibition since there's a queue to see most things, especially in the first few rooms. Luckily, I'm a magpie at exhibitions and go with what catches my eyes rather than religiously following everything on the walls.

Blake was working in the early days of mass produced printed materials so a lot of the exhibits illustrate his printed works. The novel as an art form was still in its infancy, newspapers and journals were starting and the population was becoming more literate so it must've been an exciting time to be involved with printing and the new techniques being developed. He produced loads of stuff but little of it was popular at the time. He illustrated Bible stories, Shakespeare's and Dante's poetry, his own invented mythologies, contemporary science, all sorts. He lived in an age of revolutions in France and America, great political changes across Europe and the creation of a city-based working class. It was all going on back then and Blake had a finger in many pies.

His works are constantly dramatic - there's nothing mundane or pedestrian about his vision and that gave rise to his reputation as a mystic. Whether that's 'Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils' (above) or the 'Rout of the Rebel Angels' (left). You won't see this kind of imagery  in other artists and that's part of the attraction of Blake. He invented his own artistic language rather than using the traditional, inherited forms of presenting stories in paint or whatever the medium. His depiction of the human body is instantly recognisable, whether naked or clothed, but it's often his compositions that intrigues. Look again at his 'Satan Smiting Job' and don't you think that could almost be a super-villian in a Marvel comic or film attacking the good guy? It's all about the drama, it's showing a triumphant Satan with all his power inflicting pain. Because he can. And that could be you if you're not careful.

There's a series of Blake's small paintings to illustrate his vision of Dante's 'Inferno'. I particularly liked his painting of 'Beatrice Addressing Dante' with it's delicate use of colour and almost etherial feel. The griffin drawing the chariot is fab. I want a griffin. His background colour-washes are vibrant and colourful and, in a way, remarkably modern. Who ever painted a sky like that, even a sky set in heaven, back in the day? It makes me wish that Blake had painted bigger paintings and used more oils rather than watercolour and ink.

One of the last works in the exhibition is 'The Ancient of Days', the frontispiece to his epic 'Europe'. This is one of Blake's most famous works and shows Urizen measuring the world. It's a small but dramatic piece coloured in inks and watercolour.  It's not quite A4 in size but imagine its power if it were six feet tall in a gilded frame hanging high and this could easily be god creating the world out of chaos. Maybe in Blake's mind it was?

If you're in the area and have a spare hour or so you could do a lot worse than visit this exhibition. It's on until 2 February 2020 so there's plenty of time for you to see it. I'll be going back to see it again.

Frank Bowling at Tate Britain

Frank Bowling has a major retrospective at Tate Britain at the moment and you'll be forgiven for asking Frank who? I know, I hadn't heard of him before this exhibition but I'm very pleased to know the name and the works now. The exhibition has been on for a couple of months but was over-shadowed by the Van Gogh exhibition at Tate Britain that has just closed. I immediately warmed to the exhibition when I saw that the wall outside the entrance to the exhibition had been painted pink to match one of his paintings.

Bowling was born in Guyana (then British Guinana) in 1934 and went to the Royal College of Art with David Hockney. I quite like that he came to London to become a poet but joined the RAF and then switched to painting - I don't know if he still writes. He's had studios in London and New York for the last 60 years and he paints big abstract expressionist paintings, mainly in acrylics, and he likes experimenting with the paint and the way it's applied. Most of his paintings are far too big to hang on your living room walls but they look pretty damn fab on the walls of the Tate.

The exhibition is largely chronological, with examples of his early works in the first rooms and his most recent works (including a painting from 2017) in the last room. His early works are semi-figurative and always seem to have had a yearning for abstraction, but it's interesting to see his move from figurative to non-figurative on the walls in front of you. My favourite of his early works was the colourful 'Mirror' painted in oils over 1964-66 with the central spiral staircase. Something I really liked were the tiles on the floor, some painted in 3D and other flat on. It's a very striking painting and is hung in a room with other paintings about his mother and his home, with images of a map of Africa somewhere in the paintings.

I don't know when he moved to mainly work in acrylics but it seems fitting for his style of painting, not the traditional oil paint, but let's try something new and different. On his move to abstraction he still included some figurative elements, such as images of his children peeking through the washes of paint, almost as if they're in one world looking through the painting into another world. It's a bit odd to be looking at a painting, scanning it from top to bottom and then spotting a face in the midst of all that colour, and then another face - you have to really look at these paintings, rather than just the surface colour, to see what's really going on. I wonder what his grown up children thought of seeing themselves when they were really young when they saw these paintings on the walls of the Tate? They'll be my age now with a life behind them.

Bowling seems to just love the medium of acrylic paint and how you can use it. He experimented with it in so many ways, how it's mixed and how it's applied. He apparently built a contraption in his studio so he could tilt his canvases to allow the paint to drip and flow over the canvases in different ways to create new landscapes of colour. He seems to have bene fascinated by paint and what you can achieve with it. Mix it *this* way to achieve this effect and *that* way to achieve that. The message is that you're not limited to what is in the tube or the pot of paint, you can create your own, which he did. Some of the colours he creates are astonishing, adding different things to the paints to create different effects.

Then, not satisfied by that, he started adding things to the canvas to create more textures to paint, all sorts of stuff glued to the canvas, including the collar of one his grandson's shirts. Looking at the labels of some of these later works I loved seeing the list of materials he'd made a painting with, almost always starting with acrylic paint and adding things like acrylic foam, plastic toys, shells and ending with "other materials", ie too many to mention. I think that's when I stopped marvelling at the colours he found to marvelling at the things he created and "got" Frank Bowling in my own way. He's not so much a "painter" as a "creator", he needs to create something new using his favourite medium of acrylic paint, something the world hasn't seen before and so enhance the options we have for seeing things. We cans see things differently if we want to.

One of my favourite paintings was 'Orange Balloon (4 Paul Adams)' from 1996 where you can see a deflated orange balloon bottom left but the rest of the painting is a riot of colour. Bowling was a political painter and the title of this one reflects that it was dedicated to Paul Adams, the first Black player on the South African cricket team after apartheid. I'd love to know what Adams thinks of this and the singular honour he's given. The painting is over six feet tall and covered in splodges of colour, with a bit of everything in there, deliberately.

Staying with politics and freedom, I also loved his painting 'Silver Birch (No Man, No Vote)' from 1985 that shows his support for the African national Congress and Nelso Mandela's call for 'one man, one vote'. The birch trees are made from acrylic foam and other stuff with paint dripped and splurged onto the canvas.

The final room of the exhibition brings us up to date with his works, still experimenting and still creating. I particularly liked 'Remember Thine Eyes' from 2014 with the round 'eyes' created by buckets of paints left on the wet canvas to create the effect of staring eyes. And why not? It's good to be able to see the physical aspects of creating a painting along with the actual finished painting.

At the grand age of 85 he can't physically handle the paint any more so uses a laser pen to show his assistants where he wants particular colours to go on the canvas. I love these old men that keep on creating despite their age and infirmity, like Monet and Matisse, that just keep on creating for as long as they can. I'll add Bowling to that list.

If you get the chance then pop along to Tate Britain to see these astonishing paintings while you can. I'm very pleased that I did!