Craft

The local gallery has an exhibition celebrating craft and craft materials, with each room themed according to the base naterial used - stone, metal, wood, ceramics etc. It should be right up my street, but somehow did not push the buttons and pull the levers. Partly, I think, there was a preponderance of lavish, labourious, minutely detailed work, deliberately designed to flaunt its extravagance and opulence - works by renaissance master craftspeople for wealthy patrons - intended to allow the latter to flaunt their fashionable taste, sophistication and limitless purse. It is exquisite work, but cold and calculating, lacking joy

I enjoyed some large leather pitchers - once the standard means of carrying large quantities of beer to labourers in the field - that should have been my blip-pic, I suppose, but I wasn't moved to get out the phone. I felt I should be the target audience for a modern piece built from silkworm cocoons, bonded together with "natural honeybee bio resin" (I assume that means propolis). Call me trivial, but I couldn't get the thought of puffed wheat breakfast cereal out of my mind

Emerging to leave, somehow the last of the fading light lifted my spirits more than the artwork, even with rather twee Xmas lights lining the walkway and the bridge parapet, and reflected in the lake (already troubled by the west wind that will grow in strength tomorrow). We are not looking at a natural landscape, of course; the fall of the land, the lake, the picturesque bridge, the copse on the far bank: all are confected, created by human design and artistry, purely for visual appeal. This is as much a craft as anything inside, I think; the craftsman in this case being 'Capability' Brown