Art

Hotel breakfasts in a foreign country are something of an adventure. You never know quite what is going to be presented. Even when they're doing their best it may not be what you're expecting. In Holland, they like to offer you hard-boiled eggs, kept warm under a kind of towel, and then served on a plate - which is fine, but a bit awkward. I used the glittering toast-making machine which was very efficient, and got my coffee from a machine which offered macchiato – this turned out to be a cup of hot milk with a tiny drip of coffee poured in at the end, not what most Italians would call a macchiato, but still....
My walk to the Van Gogh museum was very pleasant, since the marauding mobs of football fans had all gone home. My friend the caricaturist Mark Thatcher arrived and we spent a happy couple of hours looking at the paintings and drawings. The Hockney/Van Gogh exhibition is absolutely fantastic. I've always been slightly put off by Van Gogh, by the slightly deranged appearance that his work presents, but Hockney has clearly seen in him all the dynamic enthusiasm, colour, movement, and love of nature which also inspired his own work. The parallels between some of Van Gogh's paintings and Hockney's own are really remarkable. I love the vivid colour and the fresh brilliance of what Hockney has done with his landscape works and his reverence for VG.
As he says, if they had been available, Van Gogh would almost certainly have used iPads to create his works.
I was also very struck by how Hockney was able to assemble groups of works in say charcoal, or watercolour, and show that as a group these works have greater power and more meaning than any of the individual works could have produced.
Mark and I found a great deal to discuss in the exhibition and enjoyed exchanging ideas as we wandered round.
When we came out we looked at the extremely expensive gift shop and decided that the 10 cent plastic bags were the best value.
We then wandered off and found some lunch in an Italian café. Exploring that district was very pleasurable. But eventually we made our way back to the Rijksmuseum to see the Rembrandt show. This could not offer a greater contrast to the works we had seen in the morning. The rooms were really crowded which was rather frustrating as it was quite difficult to see some of the works.There are literally hundreds of tiny engravings which Rembrandt made over the course of his life, as well as set pieces and portraits  of such glittering power and beauty that we were spellbound. There was in fact far too much for us to take in in one day and we emerged about 4 o'clock absolutely exhausted.
I feel, at the end of the day, that I'm not really doing justice to the extraordinary day we have spent, looking at works of such power and importance.
We had a beer in a cafe where a customer built up such a debt that in the end he paid the owner by installing a statue of himself as a kind of attraction. It's rather good but a bit small.
Mark eventually headed back to the station to go home to Harlem. I came back to the hotel to drop off my things and then go out for supper. I made the mistake of going back to last night's café which was much more crowded than last night, and I was persuaded to choose a different dish which was more expensive and not as nice as last night's supper.
I now also know that there are big disruptions to the public transport tomorrow so I have no idea how I will get back to the airport.
 One good thing about the day is that I have made a series of ink and wash sketches at various points which is always pleasing.  Mark did a couple of caricatures of me, while I was drawing buildings, motorscooter, bicycles, and the funny statue outside the café.