London: Aug 4: Tate Britain Part 1

On Tuesday, August 4, 2009, I disappeared briefly from work to visit the Tate Britain. It was yet another museum where every painting comes with an explanation.

First, I walked through the odd special exhibit of contemporary art: Classified. It had three works that I want to comment on:

• Gillian Carnegie managed to a paint a forest, Black Square, using only a single color of black paint. The appearance of trees, ground, etc. is simply due to texture variations.
• Simon Patterson's piece, The Great Bear, is a tube map with stations and lines renamed after people and professions, thus drawing connections between them. Something similar could make a good Game clue.
• The Chapman Family Collection is a group of primitive-looking statues that reference McDonalds: a totem with what looks like a big mac as a head, a mask that looks like a bag of fries, some eyebrows that makes the shape of the golden arches, a person with smile like Ronald McDonald's, etc. This room certainly makes a statement about art and authenticity.

In a stairway, I found William Reynolds-Stephens's sculpture A Royal Game, which display Queen Elizabeth I and King Philip of Spain playing a chess-like game with ships (symbolizing war, obviously).

I made my way through some of the rooms of the regular collection of historic British Art, and found I could appreciate the lushness of the 18th century portraits. I also saw John Brett's The British Channel Seen from the Dorsetshire Cliffs and felt it captures the idea of a clear, tropical, relaxing day.

I took a picture along the way to Tate Britain, and a few more at dinner.

In the evening, Di Yin and I ventured out to try a Bengali restaurant on Brick Lane. It's a dried- and fresh- fish-heavy cuisine. We didn't like our meal because we felt everything was significantly oversalted.