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Art, Travel

Singapore Travel: Last Day Highlights and Art Exhibitions

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Day 38/9 Dec 3rd/4th

Our adventures, which started back in October, were drawing to a close. Our last day had dawned.

After our day of decadence yesterday, today was always going to be more prosaic. So it was breakfast, then packing our cases for the last time. In the meantime, we had to figure out what to do after checking out at eleven. We had nine hours to fill before we would be picked up for our flight at eight p.m.

We decided on a visit to the National Gallery of Singapore . We left our luggage with the concierge. We decided to walk to the gallery. It was about a ten minute walk from the hotel. The walk took us down Bridge Street, across the river and past the Parliament Building.

Not an alien spaceship, but the new Supreme Court Building

The gallery is situated in what used to be the City Hall building and the old Supreme Court building. It is a confusing building to navigate. The two earlier buildings are separate but joined, making it difficult, for me at least, to know where I was.

‘We visited one of the exhibitions named “Glisten”. It was located in the Roof Garden created by Aotearoa/New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana. A link to where we come from.

After that we decided to have lunch. There are a variety of restaurants and cuisines to chose from. They range from a three Michelin Star French Restaurant, through Cantonese to Japanese to Catalan. We settled on the Courtyard Café which does, in its own words “Straits Asian food”. It was good, even if I had to peel my own prawns.

I thought the prawns would be peeled

After lunch we went round four exhibitions. The first of which was an exhibition of the award winners in a South East Asian Art competition. It was interesting if varied in quality and style.

After that we saw, what was my favourite of the exhibitions, “Becoming Lim Tze Peng”. Lim Tze Peng is a one hundred and three year old Singapore born artist. The exhibition traces his development and his route to becoming a national treasure. He is viewed in Singapore in a similar way to David Hockney in the United Kingdom.

The other exhibition that I liked was “Kim Lim: The Space Between. A Retrospective”

Kim Lim was a sculptor. Although she was born and educated in Singapore, she mainly worked in London.

She once said that her practice was informed “not so much [by] volume, mass and weight, but with form, space, rhythm and light”.

This is lazy on my part. But, I feel that the video above gives a better overview of an artist than I can. I knew nothing of her or her work before seeing the exhibition. I liked what I saw.

By this time, it was around 5:30. We were “arted” out. It had also started to rain. This was rain as I remembered it from my time in the Solomon Islands. Like a giant bucket of water being poured out. We decided to get a taxi back to the hotel. We would have drowned in the ten minute walk back. We already knew that taxi fares went up at peak times. Rain makes getting a cab more difficult and also, apparently, even more expensive.

Back at the Park Royal Pickering, we had a final dinner. Our faithful driver arrived at 8:00. He had been the same one for all our official excursions. He whisked us off to the airport and our flight home.

Our flight was delayed slightly but took off about one in the morning. Fourteen hours later we were back where we started thirty nine days earlier.

We had pre-booked a car. It took us back home to a cold and dreary New Malden by nine a.m. Duster was there to meet us, and I think he was pleased to see us.

Our adventure sadly was over.

Australia New Zealand, Travel

Auckland, you’ve changed..

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and what have you done to The Lion Tavern?

Day 15 Sun 10th Nov 2024

Yesterday was essentially a recovery day. So to a certain extent was today. We managed to sleep late enough to miss breakfast at the hotel, and they serve breakfast until 11:00 on Sundays. Fortunately there was a cafe across the street that was still doing breakfast. 

Looking around the area near our hotel, the obvious change from forty years ago is the height of the buildings. Forty years ago, most buildings downtown were three to six stories, built in, for want of a better architectural term, colonial style. Today most of the buildings are international concrete and glass, though a few older style buildings remain.

The other major major change is beer. In 1980 there were two choices, Lion Brown, on draught, or Lion Red in bottles. If you were feeling sophisticated Steinlager was usually available.

When we went for dinner, at the Brit Pub, on our first night there was a choice of about fifteen beers, local and international. I decided on a Lion Brown, in a can, for old times sake.

Over breakfast we had made our plans for the day. We decided to go to the Auckland Art Gallery as it was a short walk from where we were.

The ground floor housed an exhibition (although it may be permanent) depicting Maori, Polynesian and European perspectives and relationships to the sea and shore.

The second and third floors house, for want of a better description, European art from c16 to c20. All perfectly good stuff. There is a Pieter Brueghel the Younger, a couple of Picassos, some works by Matisse, for example. But nothing that you wouldn’t find in a gallery in Europe. What you won’t find in a European art gallery is work by Maori and Polynesian artists. Nor will you find work by female New Zealand artists.

A. Lois White.

I won’t say that they are better artists than Picasso or Matisse, but I feel that they deserve recognition. One artist in particular caught my attention,  A Lois White. She really should be better known internationally.

After our cultural break we went to find the Sky Tower. We could see it from our bedroom window and thought we should go up it.

On the way there I found what had happened to the Lion Tavern, the start of many a run ashore in Auckland.

This was the Lion Tavern

It doesn’t exist anymore. The building is still there but looks semi derelict, waiting to be turned into another glass and steel office block.

The Skytower, is I think still the tallest building in New Zealand. There is also one other important fact. The Auckland Sky Tower is 19 m taller than the Sydney Tower, mainly due to the radio antenna. It is also slightly taller than the Eiffel Tower.

The view from the top could have been spectacular, but the cloud base descended.

Our hotel is in here somewhere

Dinner was at a place called The Angus Steak House,  The steaks were large but well cooked.

Our hotel in Auckland, The Hotel Britomart, was excellent. Possibly not the cheapest digs in town but we would recommend it fully. The staff couldn’t have been more helpful. They also have bikes available for the use of guests.

Art, Campervan Adventures

Spain day two Bilbao and the Guggenhiem

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We were still staying at Camping Playa Arenillas. Today we had decided to go to Bilbao, specifically to visit the Guggenheim Museum. The trip required two buses and although the information we had from the campsite was a bit vague, we thought we had it sorted.

Not quite. There was supposed to be a bus stop near the campsite,  but we couldn’t see one, so we decided to walk along to the stop in the village. As we were walking along the bus went past. Diane elisted the help of a couple of local council workers, but they spoke as much English as we speak Spanish. They tried to get us a taxi,  but to no avail. We gave up and they went back to doing what they should have been doing.  Shortly after, a bus that wasn’t shown on our timetable appeared, to take us into Castro where we could get the bus to Bilbao.

We got to Bilbao about twelve and found a taxi to take us to the Museum. It is an impressive building. Designed by Frank Gehry and opened in 1997. For more information follow this link

What we thought was the entrance.

We found our way in.

External views

The ground floor is given over to exhibitions and installations. One in particular,  which is site specific, Richard Serra’s “The Matter of Time” is highly impressive.

The Matter of Time

It is massive, sinuous and confusing to navigate. So in a sense it echos the museum. It is formed from large 50mm thick steel plates. So as well as being an amazing work of art, there was some serious engineering involved in its production.

There were two exhibitions on at the time of our visit.  The first was of the work of the French painter Jean Dubuffet. 

Following the Second World War he decided to reject the conventional norms of aesthetic beauty, to create art in what he described as a more authentic manner. He adopted non-conventional materials. In some ways his art was informed by the same sensibilities as the contemporary Italian “Arte Povera” movement. Though how much contact they had is unclear. Ultimately what he produced was one of the foundations of what was known as the “Art Brut” movement.

Dubuffet

The second exhibition was titled “Motion, Autos, Art and Architecture” it is curated by Norman Foster. In some ways it was similar to an exhibition that the V&A put on a couple of years ago. The emphasis was slightly different. The V&A exhibition concentrated on the design of the car, whereas this exhibition concentrated on the vehicle as an art object. There were some beautiful cars, notably a Citroën DS and a 1959 Cadillac (the one with the tail fins). The cars were complimented by art contemporary to their creation. It worked well.

The top floor is dedicated to the permanent collection. There is a Rothko, an Yves Klien, a Cy Twombly series, as well as a few others.

Outside the museum there are various large scale artworks, mainly by Jeff Koons, “Mamam” , Louise Bourgeois massive spider sculpture also features.

Puppy-Jeff Koons
Mamam

It was worth the trip.

Art, Opinions

Watercolour @ Tate Britian

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Watercolour Tate Britian

I am a bit late to the party with this review. The exhibition opened in February and closes on 21st of August. Various circumstances prevented me from visiting until recently, but I think it is worth recording my opinions, even if it is only for my benefit.

Before I start the review I should explain that watercolour is my least favourite method of making artistic marks on paper(or any other support for that matter). I find it difficult to handle if I am working anything bigger than A5 size and I find that my results are generally disappointing. There are some artists who can handle the technicalities of medium, but I generally find that their work is, how shall I put it gently, boring. I associate watercolours with meticulously rendered reproductions of country churches and pastoral landscapes. Paintings that make me think, why didn’t you just take a photograph and save yourself the time and trouble.

I also tend to think of watercolour as a very English method of painting. I don’t know if this is a good thing, a bad thing or something that does not really matter.

I did, however, go to the Tate ready to have my opinions of the medium and the artists who use it radically revised.
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