Bexhill delights

Gallery outside the Café of the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill

Bexhill boasts, I understand, the highest proportion of centenarians in the UK.  Unsurprisingly, this makes it one of the less exciting towns along the south coast.  However, it also boasts the De La Warr Pavilion, an Art Deco gem that has a popular art gallery as well as an auditorium regularly filled not only for the visiting Z-list pop-stars that blight seaside towns but also movies and live transmissions from opera houses and the National Theatre.  

Since it's a short, if painfully slow, drive from Hastings, we go over from time to time.  The other day we went to see the two exhibitions that are on, of works by Alison Turnbull and Matt Calderwood. 

The Pavilion's website says that Alison Turnbull is known for the intricate abstract paintings and drawings she creates from found materials, such as diagrams, plans, charts and maps. The exhibition presents new and recent works exploring ideas around observation, orientation and perspective.

In the course of my current MA my tutor, Eoghan Walls, has been emphasising the importance in contemporary poetry of the concrete and specific. As a result, there's a curious culture shock for me, now, in encountering conceptual works of visual art that are said to be "exploring ideas".  I've always been interested in contemporary art, though I find much of it baffling.  A curator friend of mine encouraged me, many years ago, not to be too analytical, but to "follow the clues".  I found this less helpful than picking up on what I came to think of as resonance - there were times when I hadn't the vaguest idea of what the artist was doing, but found myself thinking of it several days later.  

But I'm afraid it wasn't working with Alison Turnbull's carefully planned and detailed paintings, meticulously executed though they were.  Sometimes, I'm afraid, it's just a question of taste.  

On an upper level of the Pavilion, Matt Calderwood had assembled a group of structures that had stood outside in the open for a number of months and bore the effects of weather.  The Pavilion website says: Exposure Sculpture (2013) are geometric structures made from welded steel clothed in billboard paper. Located on the roof during the summer months, they have now been reassembled in the gallery space and reveal the results from the four months' exposure to the elements during the outdoor installation prior to the exhibition.  Sorry, Mr Calderwood, I don't get this either.  

Don't get me wrong.  I'm delighted to have been to these exhibitions and would like to understand a bit better what these artists are getting at.  In both cases the artists have given talks in the Pavilion, explaining their intentions,  It's a pity there's no recording of these presentations on the website.  It doesn't mean that understanding their intention better would necessarily make me like what they're dong.  But at least I'd be better informed.

As it is, I'm afraid we had to take refuge in the Trattoria Italiana, a bustling restaurant on the seafront, before ambling along the front in the sun.  There are worse ways of spending the day.    

Antony Mair

Gearing up for the Piano Concerto Competition

The first three weeks of March in Hastings are devoted to the Hastings Musical Festival, which has been going for more than a century.  It's not a festival like those in Edinburgh or Brighton, but consists of a series of competitions for performers in music and dance.   In recent years the jewel in the crown of the Festival has been the Hastings International Piano Concerto Competition, which takes place in the first week of March, the final being on Saturday March 8th.

Last year we were in the audience for the final, which was an amazing event.  This year we have foolishly volunteered to help with the running of the Competition, together with about twenty others.  Not, you will understand, in any highfalutin fashion: our tasks will be restricted to guiding contestants from rehearsal venues to the stage of the White Rock Theatre for their performance.  On the night of the final we are likely to be selling programmes.

So today saw the small volunteer army being inducted to the mysteries of the White Rock Theatre, better known for performances by popstar lookalikes and the occasional dire production of classical opera and ballet.  There's the usual labyrinth of backstage corridors and small dressing-rooms, and that strange feeling, when you come on stage, of the auditorium being somehow smaller than you thought it would be.  We were given a slightly bewildering list of instructions by our masters, and I left hoping that I would be able to deliver my charges safely to the venue for their allotted time without accident or mishap.  No doubt all will come right on the night.  At least on the final evening we shall be doing some fairly brainless activity rather than shepherding our virtuosos to the Yamaha grand.  I'm just hoping we'll be able to hear the performances as well.

Antony Mair

A lull between storms

Storm damage in Hill Street, Hastings Old Town

The past few weeks haven't been much fun, weatherwise.  Those of you living outside the UK may have seen the odd snap of people wading through waist-high waters in their living-rooms.  Or perhaps not - the UK media have given zero coverage to the disappearance of beaches and threats to coastal buildings down France's Atlantic coast.  For those of you ignorant of what's been happening, I can tell you that there are swathes of the British countryside seriously under water.  Hastings being built on largely hilly ground, we haven't had the flood problem.  But my God have we had gales.  The Shoebox and its nextdoor neighbour the Matchbox comprise a building two sides of which are built of a timber frame fronted by tiles.  The south-west facing wall is brick with a cement render.  In the winds - which have reached around 80 mph but who's measuring precisely? - the building moves, particularly noticeably on the top floor.  More importantly, the people who put the cement render on instead of a limestone one, around a century ago, seem to have ignored the fact that cement is inflexible.  So when the building moves, cracks form in the render.  And when the rain is being hurled against the cracked wall at 80 mph it gets in.

Not that we can complain.  We knew there was a problem and it'll get fixed - rather expensively - this summer.  Quite apart from the dire straits of those in Somerset and the Thames Valley, many of our neighbours have far more to grouse about: leaky roofs and crumbling chimneystacks result in soaked attics, boundary walls have been blown down, a landslip behind a row of houses on the front pinned the occupants in their basements.  And the house shown above lost most of its outside wall into a diminutive side garden.   

Today we have had a brief reprieve.  A cloudless sky with a gentle breeze.  We've been told more wind and rain are on their way.  It was terrible to begin with - but do you know?  we're actually getting used to it.  Even so, I'll be glad when it's over.

Antony Mair