Green Park in the rain

The morning spent emailing and following up leads, after which there is nothing for it but to go into town. The weather is mixed, either sun or violent rain, so I skip in and out of galleries and shops.

I pop into Bates the hatter in Jermyn Street in the hope of a picture, but the shop is too busy (there are 4 of us), so skip into Paxton and Whitfield for marvelous cheese to take to Anne Marie's on Sunday.

Gregory Crewdson at White Cube Mason's Yard is astonishing. I have a book of his work as I love his take on middle America and admire his HUGE production values. However, nothing prepared me for the enormity of his images in real life. They are very large for a start, context is not only the word, but the story, and he has retouched them in such a way that they have a painterly quality, unlike anything I've ever seen before.

Then to Chris Beetles for a post view (the show had finished) of the John Swannell photographs. Pretty simple stuff by comparison. There is a line where he says something like "women should be beautiful and men interesting", which is a fair enough comment. However I couldn't help looking at some of the female nudes and thinking 'where is her buttock crease' and 'what happened to the shadow where her leg meets her abdomen'. It seems the man can't draw. Either that or his retouchers couldn't.