Arbie's Unoriginally Titled Book Blog
It's a blog! Mainly of book reviews.
Currently reading
My Indian Travels, Peter Brown
Peter "Pete the Street" Brown is an ever more popular and famous contemporary impressionist painter, who made his name working on the streets of Bath. He got invited on two trips to Udaipur, India, with a group of other contemporary Brit painters. Because he wrote a bunch of anecdotes about his work in his first book, Brown's Bath and in a subsequent catalogue of paintings of diverse locations in the south of England, he was asked to keep a diary of the trips to India with an eye on another book.
And here it is. I rate Brown very highly as a painter but I don't like these paintings as much as the British ones and particularly the Bath ones. They are not bad; they show lively street scenes depicting the rather more chaotic life of India where sacred cows are in your face and tuk-tuks are all over the place and much of the architecture is higgledy-piggledy, often painted with remarkable colours and this suits Brown down to the ground; it's what he loves. But I love the architecture of Bath with its golden stone, more.
The diary is also not as good; previously we had short memories of things that stuck in Brown's mind some time after the relevant painting was completed. Here we have instant impressions, some of which are quite dull or merely too lengthy - and Brown, as he will admit, is not a writer - nor is his publisher - , the art dealer, Messum's - used to proof-reading or copy editing this kind of thing. Mis-spellings go by un-noticed and typos also slip by uncorrected.
The increased area of text also consequently reduces the area available for reproducing the paintings. Bigger images and fewer words would have made this much better.
3
2