The National Gallery once more...

In the Gallery I stayed with Peter Paul Rubens - classical and Biblical scenes, vigorous movement and voluptuous figures in glowing colour.

Outside, daylight saving was gone.  The Hindu Festival of Lights - Diwali - was celebrated with electrifying dance in Trafalgar Square.  I looked on from the steps of the National Gallery - more vigorous movement and voluptuous figures in glowing colour.

Jakarta doesn't have daylight saving, being closer to the Equator.  Wet season or dry season, all year round, it's light by about 6.00 am and dark by about 6.00 pm.  I waited for the long days of summer, but they never came.  But if there are differences, there are similarities.  Now, east of Jakarta on the island of Bali, Indonesians also celebrate the Festival of Lights.

As I walked down to Jubilee Bridge the sounds of Diwali faded.  On the Bridge I made a drawing, steering clear of Halloween revellers in Edvard Munch 'Scream' masks, while carousel music from South Bank mingled with the tooting and shouting from Thames party cruises.

The National Gallery again...

I ran down to the National Gallery just before closing, to spend time with the Van Goghs and, as it turned out, quite a few French families.  Nearby was an 1891 Henri Rousseau - 'Surprised!' - a startled tiger in jungle.

Earlier in the week I'd been to the zoo.  London is a city of lion statues - outside the British Museum - at the Houses of Parliament - on the coat of arms.  I wanted to see the real animal, and found a family of Asian lions, dozing.

Nearby was the glass enclosure of a young male Sumatran tiger, neither dozing nor surprised but pacing endlessly, to the mystery and the delight of gathering families.

In Sumatra, the large Indonesian island, to the north of Java, these tigers are becoming endangered.  'The Jakarta Post' reports increasing 'human-tiger' conflicts as forest areas decrease, and annual forest fires blanket Singapore and parts of Malaysia in heavy smoke haze.

At closing time, I walked out of the Gallery, past the lion statues in Trafalgar Square, past the statue of Richard the Lionheart outside the Houses of Parliament, to a place just upriver of Lambeth Bridge, where I stopped and made this drawing.

A visit to the National Gallery

I stayed with the Renaissance Italians, seen so many times in books and now, in the original.

The outlines were familiar, but the colours so much more intense.  It also took a while to adjust to the size of the works.

What is there of the Renaissance in Jakarta?   Galleries exhibit modern Indonesian sculptors and painters.

Perhaps the Renaissance is reflected at third or fourth remove in the Graeco-Roman features of Dutch colonial buildings - in the colonnades, pediments and atria of palaces, museums and courts.

I took a tour of the state rooms of the Presidential Palace during the school holidays, along with hundreds of school children in uniform, and their parents.  They had travelled all night by bus for a day in Jakarta, and would travel all night to go home, taking with them their photographs to show their friends where they had been, what they had seen.

After the Gallery I stood on the Thames Embankment near Lambeth Bridge, among people photographing the Houses of Parliament, to draw at dusk.

A visit to the National Portrait Gallery

Pictures of the grand and the famous, by the grand and the famous.

And some unexpected treats - life drawings by Bridget Riley, before she became celebrated for her abstracts (seen last week at the Tate Modern).  In the 20th century collections, I didn't recall having seen previously so many depictions of Winston Churchill at so many ages.  And a special little exhibition of drawings of Rome, made when English travel to the Continent was possible after the Napoleonic Wars.

In Jakarta, portraiture is a vibrant art.  In the realm of the grand and the famous, larger-than-life-size portraits of each visiting head of state and spouse, freshly-painted, are mounted in Medan Merdeka (Freedom Square) beside portraits of the Indonesian President and spouse.  They all face the Presidential Palace, across the road, for the length of the official visit.

And for those who would like a portrait, whether famous or not, the street stalls of the portrait-makers can be found several blocks away, near Pasar Baru, on the banks of the Ciliwung.  Their stalls face Gedung Kesenian (Arts Building) which, in 1821, replaced the Municipal Theatre built by Thomas Stamford Raffles when he was Lieutenant-Governor of Java during the Napoleonic Wars.

After the Gallery I wandered down Whitehall to the Thames, to the Egyptian obelisk near Waterloo Bridge.  I made a drawing at sunset.

A visit to the Tate Modern Gallery

Time away from settling in and signing up.  Time to settle down

This was my first visit to the Gallery.  On a rainy London Sunday, with a major exhibition showing, it was crowded.  I stayed on Level 5 for a while - Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock.  And when the rain eased, I wandered down to the pebbled southern bank of the Thames, exposed at low tide.  It was another world of seagulls, distant ferries, and rusty anchors.

Over the past few days I've seen a few pedicabs in London.  Jakarta banned pedicabs ('becak') years ago.  A hindrance to traffic, they were loaded in barges and dumped at sea.  There weren't many barges on the Thames today.

I sat on one of the anchors to make this drawing of a buoy under the Blackfriars rail bridge.