Well rounded cabbages

Saturday saw us at the Tower of London and on Sunday we were swanning around Chichester in West Sussex. What a contrast that was. On Saturday evening my sister-in-law spotted a review in the paper of an exhibition of Edward Burra's paintings at Pallant House and on Sunday morning that is where we headed.

To my shame here is another artist I had never heard of but apparently Edward Burra (1905-1976) was one of the most individual and celebrated artists of the 20th century. Like Tracey Emin's work you find yourself drawn into his paintings even if you find them repellent or menacing.

A lot of his works are very large watercolours using several sheets of paper joined together. I don't think I've seen watercolour paintings this big before with such intensity and depth of colour. According to one of the printed notices on the wall his friends said he would begin painting at the bottom right hand corner and work his way up to the top left hand corner. He had such a fantastic sense of composition and storytelling that you find your eyes going round and round a painting while you explore it to the point of feeling travel sick.

Because of the size of these works I assumed he must have used large brushes. This assumption was crushed when we got a chance to look at some of his brushes and palettes on display in a cabinet. They were tiny! So that made me wonder just how long it took him to complete one piece of work and there was a lot of work on display.

In his youth he was fascinated with the dark side of humanity and it is present in very ordinary looking scenes, for example sailors buying coffee in a café. He uses perspective in an odd way which is disturbing. A lot of the work is sexually ambiguous and he was fascinated with soldiers, sailors and prostitutes and particularly their well rounded behinds. As I moved from one painting to another I got the feeling that these characters were following my every move.

In time Edward Burra turned to still lifes and landscapes. Apparently he had a photographic memory so could recall a view when he was back in his studio. I wish I could do that. One still life depicted well rounded cabbages that recalled the well rounded bottoms of soldiers climbing into a truck in an earlier gallery. He managed to instill menace into these cabbages and I felt they were following me around too! A still life of flowers in a vase appeared to have eyes that followed us around as well.

His depiction of the English landscape was not in the least sentimental and in one showed the pollution being belched out by lorries and motorcycles. Of all his work these were the works I most liked. There was one charming painting he probably made towards the end of his life. It is a collection of portraits of local characters including a self-portrait of him standing away from everyone else eating a Cornish pasty.

Tracey Emin - 'Love is what you want'

This afternoon Graham and I had a mini holiday swanning around our home town which also doubles as our capital city, London. After we'd had lunch in Islington we abandoned our original plan of joining in the World Literature Weekend because we would have been too late getting there having spent too long in the Compton Arms setting the world to rights with some friends from Union Chapel.

So we jumped on a bus heading towards Waterloo and got off near the South Bank Centre. We decided, since we were there, that we might as well go and see Tracey Emin's exhibition Love is what you want. Neither of us have been what you'd call mad fans of her work but we were prepared to give her a go, so to speak. And the exhibition was amazing.

If the job of an artist is to shed light on some aspect of the human condition that often remains concealed Tracey does that in spades. She mines her personal history and puts it on display for all to see and it's often very confrontational and painful to look at. She is described as a natural storyteller and she says of herself that 'writing is the backbone of everything she does'. She creates blankets with appliquéd words sewn onto them which recount episodes from her family history. She works in neon too so her words are lit up in pinks and blues.

She's made short films which are both funny and poignant and being short deserve watching more than once. Her output is staggering and it includes sculpture and drawings, large and small and collections of memorabilia. I'm often tempted, when visiting an exhibition, to skip over some items and leave with a general view. But in this exhibition I found I was drawn into her work and left feeling emotionally wrung out by the descriptions of sexual abuse, abortions, looking for love, losing love, living alone, the loss of fertility and seeing her beloved Nan's (grandmother) dead body for the last time.

Following this we needed therapeutic coffee and cake and headed to the Members' Bar in the Festival Hall nearby where I made the sketch below. Thanks Tracey, great show!

View over the river Thames from the Festival Hall