Leo woke up before 7! I thought he might go back off to sleep but nope, he grabbed his iPad and started watching Sam and Cat on Netflix, which then woke poor Oscar up.
I got up and sorted out breakfast for them and seeing as my leg was still feeling a bit better I did another little work-out. It's only 10 minutes and nothing high impact so it works quite well for now. I might double it up tomorrow if the leg holds out. 🤞
Today I wanted to go to a new area for a little walk along the coast line and then head to a new beach for the boys to try out. Once packed up we made our way up the road a little way to Watergate Bay, parked up and started our walk.
The boys all did great to start with but Leo was flagging early on and saying he was tired a lot. Rob is really good with him though and managed to encourage him to keep going all the way along to the next beach which was Mawgan Porth.
We tried to get some food at a restaurant but the waiting time was an hour and I knew we would need to fuel up the boys sooner than that. I gave them some snacks out of my bag and queued up for some chips at the fish and chip shop.
Leo really wanted one of us to get the car to come and pick him but with with a bit of bribery we were able to get him to walk back.
On our way back we bumped into our neighbour who lives 2 doors away! What are the chances of that! Crazy coincidence.
Once we got back to the car, Leo was very excited about going on to the beach and was stripped naked within seconds and was soon trying to head off, clothed, with the bodyboard, through the car park to the sea. We managed to get him to wait for us so that he knows where base camp is and then he flaps off into the sea, Oscar closely behind him. Ellis being a misery still won't get in the sea and I must admit I'm really disappointed as I know he would love it. 😔
The sun came out and it was so nice to just sit and enjoy the warmth, listen to the sea and watch the kids have a lovely time. Rob doesn't like it at all but doesn't moan too much. He hates the sun, sand, sun cream, has a bad toe, was thirsty, hungry and wanted to get back to get clean and fed.
We let the boys have a good couple of hours before we managed to get them back to the car.
It was mad busy when we got back. I showered the 2 little uns and then sorted dinner for all of us. Cleared up and eventually made it to the rooftop terrace with my colouring book to have a bit of chill out time. It was lovely.
We put the kids to bed before 10pm and then Rob and I relaxed in the living room doing our own things. I'm going to try and get to bed before 2am. It's weird that I haven't needed as much sleep recently, I suspect it's a phase.
I hope the weather is nice tomorrow. Red sky at night...
Where they to? 18th August Montreal
Well, at least we tried. With the best intentions, we visited the Montreal Fine Art Museum today. We made our donation and headed straight for the top floor (the museum is spread across 8). The first piece you see is probably the pride and joy of the museum. A Bronze by Rodin - The Thinker. We presume it's a smaller version of the original made by the same sculptor. Even us mere plebs could recognise it. It was, to all intents and purposes, a pleasant statue and, being such a revered and well known work of art, we felt as though we ought to spend some time trying to appreciate and understand what it is that makes it so admired but, try as we might, we could never get beyond simply thinking 'Yeah, that's a nice little statue.'
We slipped quietly into the first exhibition room, feeling a little intimidated by the people who were moving around and soaking up the experience like they knew what they were looking at. There was a coarse, elderly woman who seemed to want to try to impress everyone in the room by bellowing out a comment at the top of her voice such as "Ohhhh, that's beauuuuutiful!" with every painting she stopped by.
This was better than the Rodin bronze, though. At least a layman can begin to comprehend and appreciate the talent it takes to produce a good oil-painting. We slowly worked our way around the walls, being mindful to give each painting the time it merited to try to appreciate what it was that qualified it for a space on the wall of a fine art museum. The first few were impressive, clearly crafted and nurtured by an expert in their field. We recognised some of the names too - Monet and Picasso spring to mind. Unfortunately, and here's the catch, some of them were just plain shite. There is no other word for it. I don't care what their name is or who they were taught by or what other work they've done, if some of those paintings found themselves in my possession, they'd be unwittingly handed over to the dustbin men for burial in the nearest landfill. I can say with all sincerity that I wouldn't be proud of having created some of the paintings that we saw. I've already mentioned Picasso and the painting that we saw by him falls into that category. I'd have guessed it was by him because it is painted in such a distinctive style, and maybe that's the appeal, but there is nothing about it that tells me that it wasn't painted by a 12 year old school kid with no artistic talent whatsoever. Bulbous, odd coloured eyes, rhomboid heads, misplaced genitalia. I'm sorry, I simply don't get it. Perhaps we were trying too hard. Perhaps we aren't educated enough. Perhaps its beauty exists on a plane that no amount of education could every bring us to understand. Whatever it is, we just walked away from it looking at one-another, shaking our tilted heads in cockled bemusement.
That's not to say that it was all that way. For four hours, we persevered, feeling as though we didn't have the right to pass judgement unless we, at least, tried. Some of the work grabbed our attention, generally the traditional landscapes and portraits where the idea is simply to recreate, on canvas, what the artist is seeing rather than to create an abstract interpretation of it. We also found that we slowed down when we came to a collection of pencil sketches by Rembrandt. To have the ability to create pictures with such depth and texture with only a pencil and a plain piece of paper is a gift rarely bestowed.
Towards the end of our visit, we spent some time in the Contemporary Art exhibition hall. If some of the paintings we'd seen earlier were shite then I can't even begin to find the words to describe what this mish-mash of creations was. How the perpetuators of these crimes against art ever have the cheek to call themselves artists is a slur against those who have a genuine talent to create something that 99.999% of us can't. My stomach is knotted just thinking about it. It's flipping money for old rope, that's what it is. What a scam. They must close their door on an evening and wonder if the day is ever going to come when they are going to be rumbled. I'd do it myself only I don't have the neck to try.
One of the jewels in the crown is an artist described as being 'one of the most radical Automatistes' - Paul-Emile Borduas. There is a huge written passage describing his career and evolution as an artist using flowery language and elitist terminology. It finishes with the following paragraph:
Rejection, solitude and exile marked the end of Borduas's existence. Borduas, who had long been interested in American painting, went to for two years, from 1953 to 1955, to New York, and then to Paris, where he died in 1960. Throughout all this time he continued painting, gradually freeing himself from colour, just as he had abandoned the model, the constraining gesture and illusion of space. This final development can be seen in the black-and-white paintings from the last years of his life.
Now, I'm sorry, I don't know about you but that just sounds like utter twaddle to me. Freed himself from colour? You what? Ran out of paint, more like. The illusion of space? What illusion? How is space an illusion? It's there, all around you. Look. Open your eyes. The only illusion he created is the illusion that he is an artist.
I was a very naughty boy and took some pictures of these paintings from his final years. Take a look and make your own minds up.
This is a wall of work from his final years when he appeared to have freed himself from all but brown, black and white.
And here, and I kid you not, is a painting by Borduas when he freed himself from everything but white. Seriously. Just white paint swooshed around a bit on some canvas, framed and mounted on the wall of a fine art museum.
This fella really was having a laugh. If he was alive today, I'd want to shake him by the hand and say well done as there can surely have never been a better scam than the artist who 'freed himself from colour'. What's the logical next step? Free yourself from paint? What's the metaphor? The poet who freed himself from words? What utter, unashamed, emphatic, stupendous shite.
I've come out of today feeling somewhat enlightened. I used to think that the artists were the geniuses, the experts should be revered and the rest of us were, well, the rest of us. But now, I realise that few artists are geniuses although some surely are, most artists are scam artists who do real artists an enormous disservice, most experts are gullible pawns who are there simply to maintain the industry and serve the scam artists and the rest of us who wonder what it's all about and why we don't get it, don't get it because there is nothing to get. What a complete bunch of tosh. It'll be a long time before we try again.
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