Swings and roundabouts

Another day of heavy downpours kept me indoors, being productive with Zoom meetings, phone calls, processing photographs of California from 2010 and, next, cooking veg chilli.  On the plus side, the heavy rain once again absolved me from having to water the hanging baskets. As this progress report picture shows, they are coming along nicely. The lobelia are just starting to flower, which is when this particular design comes into its spectacular phase. When I bought the plants, I was careful to choose only red and white but, as so often happens, some blue ones have sneaked in.

A first listen to an album which was recorded by Neil Young in the 1970s but has only just been released - Homegrown. My favourite track was Vacancy.

David Hockney has been one of my favourite painters, ever since I visited his gallery at Salt's Mill near Bradford back in the 1990s. He is a highly versatile and inventive artist, having recently taken to using an iPad to produce large digital images. He came to fame in the 1960s, particularly with a variety of swimming pool pictures, painted in California, such as A Bigger Splash  (1967.) 

From that period, I also enjoy his portraits of pairs of people, which have a severe, almost surreal quality - for example American Collectors (1968) which shows Marcia and Fred Weisman, frequent buyers of his pictures. Their rigid stance, not looking at each other or their art has a dreamlike, disturbing quality. They did not keep the picture.