What is ART?
According to a Google search it is ‘the human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature’, and ‘it is the conscious production of arrangement of sounds, colours, forms, movements’.
It has been with us forever, well as long as humankind has, and it has been beautiful, appealing, and something that is created with imagination and skill. Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy.

I came away from the Traverse Theatre last night, after watching a play called ‘Unfaithful’ by Owen McCafferty, with my head swimming with ‘bad’ language. F..k and c..t in every sentence, nudity that would have made John Ruskin pass out, while John and I squirmed as the lad with the willy strutted about without a care in the world. We listened to the ranting of the middle-aged woman who had booked an escort for the night to pay back her husband who had transgressed with a twenty year old he had met in a hotel bar. Lies, truth, inflections of the truth, doubts and suggestions – what was it all about? The critics said it was a play that portrayed the quashing of boredom in a long term relationship.
OK! John and I breathed in deeply when the skinny ‘old’ guy got out of bed stark naked. Where is art in all this? A body is a body after all. We revere the wonders of chiselled marble, and hold up the classical David as perfection. So why do I squirm in a theatre? Am I alone in this? Everyone just sat and looked and pretended to be so sophisticated, but how were they feeling? Nudity on the screen is one thing, and we are inured to that; nudity should be accepted as normal, for after all we are not so dissimilar from each other, but maybe it’s a generation thing, although I don’t think so. And WHY do writers feel they have to portray their characters speaking F and C all the time? Am I missing something? This play is modern, portraying NOW. It is supposed to reflect a sensitive time in our society, of how people feel towards each other as they grow older and time is running out. But we don’t speak like that, none of our friends and acquaintances speak like that, so why are we supposed to find it acceptable in films and plays?
The older man, to taunt his wife, described what he and the young girl had done in the doorway just off a busy street. The words were liquid pornography. There was a wishful thinking in his words, lies within lies, but his wife could only accept what he said as the truth. For the five minutes the actor took to deliver the lines, the audience sat stunned, listening to the graphic details of violent, erotic sex – so why was there a need for nudity? And of course, threaded throughout was the inevitable use of the F and C words.
The play was interrupted by an elderly man who had a heart attack, and the drama reverted from the stage to the auditorium. ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ (There were two.) ‘Please vacate the seats and allow him to be helped out.’ His face was as grey as ash. We all craned our necks to see how the staff managed to get him into a wheelchair and removed. Poor guy – I hope it wasn’t the play that brought it on!
Reading this through it sounds as though I didn’t like the play. In fact I did, I liked the gritty story, the set, the characters, and the clever use of feelings and language. It was Art, cleverly portraying life seen through a magnifying glass.

We also went to see the film ‘Boyhood’ on Thursday. It was pouring with rain, so a perfect way so spend the afternoon.

We loved it, it was so beautifully done, and we watched the child grow in real time.

It was filmed using the same actors at different stages of their lives as they grew up over a period of twelve years, and it’s impossible to watch the film and not relate to one’s own life experiences. The director, Richard Linklater, introduces the film by saying, ‘Here is my latest film, hope you enjoy it!’ Simplicity after such a marathon!
We came out of the cinema and it was still raining so we each had a double vodka and a packet of crisps and sat and had deep thoughts. Was this Art?

John celebrated his birthday yesterday, so we ate out in a lovely French restaurant, and walked home in the drizzle, full of duck and good wine, and as we walked by St Mary’s Cathedral we saw beautiful ethereal apparitions hanging in the trees from swings tied to the branches – so phosphorescent, so delicate, and so anonymous. Art?

We have now joined the real world and have bought a car AND a garage! Now that is some shopping spree! It is tornado red and a VW Golf 5 door hatchback! We take possession of it on Thursday, and then the freedom of the road is ours. Vrrooom! Where shall we go? Probably to Asda and do the weekly shop!

Today we called into the Edinburgh Arts club, to see an exhibition of George McBean’s paintings, they were well observed portraits of views around the city, I liked the poignant one of two gentlemen on the fringe of things, somehow just missing the connection.

And tomorrow I fly down to Wales to meet a certain little lady that I haven’t seen since she was 18 days old. I can’t wait!