A visit to the Tate Gallery

I went to see the Turner Prize exhibition, and the Joseph Mallord William Turner paintings.

The Turner Prize is awarded for contemporary art.  Visitors moved slowly through the works.  It was a thought-provoking exhibition.

The JMW Turner paintings were much more accessible to my eye - although apparently not in his day.  He was criticised as a romantic, following an entirely personal vision in his representations of water, sky and light in London and Venice.  In the adjoining room there were eight small etchings by William Blake, hand-coloured and sombre.  Again, these were well-known forms but smaller than the familiar book reproductions and intense, pulling one into intricate enclosed space quite different from the sense of immensity in the Turner paintings.

Outside the Gallery, as darkness fell, I walked across the road to the Thames.  The whiz-banging of fireworks started up again, as it had every night this week - an extended bonfire night - a lengthy tribute to Guy Fawkes and the gunpowder plot.

In Jakarta, Chinese New Year is a like this - fireworks every night for a week.  Drinking tea and sitting in my favourite armchair on the eighteenth floor, I watched coloured sparks hurtle into the sky, explode into shimmering gold, and fade away, in one part of the Chinese quarter after another.

I stood on the Millbank Millenium Pier to make a drawing of the lights from the Albert Embankment.