May 11th (2020)

 

May 11th
I am awake at 6am, or thereabouts.

I wait downstairs for Phany, at 8am.

Phany comes, looking younger and younger everyday. She looks about 16 years old right now. We walk up the road and reach the bank, only to discover that today is a Bank Holiday. It seems that I now have to wait until tomorrow to get my Visa card from out of the card swallowing machine. Luckily I wasn’t foolish enough to spend all of  my money  but held back just enough to get by another day or so. Therefore I have enough for today’s general shopping at Thai Huot Market.

My breakfast is a banana sandwich, just bread with banana, no butter and a mug of 'Red'.

My lunch is an avocado and tomato sandwich, again not butter.

I notice that the midi Mac has Adobe InDesign, and maybe  just maybe I might be able to get out a 'Special' issue of The Blue Lotus magazine, concerned with artists' interpretations of our current pandemic predicament. I approach one Indian female artist who is on my Facebook friends list and  tell her what I am  planning for The Blue Lotus. She asks me if it has anything to do with art. I am a bit taken aback considering... I let that go after sending her a link to Issuu. She  tells me that I need to write to so-and-so to gain their permission. I explain that I have no time for that due to my current predicament. She is really giving me a hard time, and I am offering her a free place in my magazine. Some people are just too up themselves. Her loss, de-friended, blocked.

Now I research for today’s art history lesson, showing the mutual interest that East and West had in each other's culture.

I talk about the flow of ideas, the exhibitions, expositions and showings of prints and artworks Japan to Paris, Paris to Japan, Japan to China to Singapore and Malaysia. I speak of Gauguin and Van Gough and Japanese prints, of Gauguin's influence on painters in Bali. Gauguin's interest in Angkor and Borobudur. We look at printmaking, of Chinese ink and brush paintings traditional and contemporary.

I speak of the 1922 Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta and about Germany's romance with India, which seems to dissipate after the Calcutta exhibition. Phany asks about Contemporary art, and I give her a very brief outline while we watch a pile of bricks and an unmade bed and again talk about Dada and Surrealism and Duchamp.

I am too tired to write more today.