To Abbot Hall for a wander around the “Expanding Landscapes – painting after land art” exhibition. I have – finally! – grasped that I must not expect an immediate “wow” moment – e.g. Dr Pozzi. (Actually, though, there was a “wow” moment – Hannah Brown’s “Verge”, which made me wonder which might lurk in its darkness even while its exuberant growth enchanted me.)

But in general there was no sense of “immediate” in my viewing; I had to read and watch in order to enjoy some of the work. I particularly liked Onya McCausland’s focus on paint colours originally coming from the earth and Jessica Warboys’s river series. It gave depth to paintings that were otherwise a bit underwhelming.

I hadn’t been to Abbot Hall for a while: time to go. There’s an exhibitions of portraits where I enjoyed looking at the way different artists used brushstrokes to represent flesh; there was almost something “paint by numbers”ish about Lucien Freud. I notice that they’re all rather beige.

A room of botanical/garden studies (I particularly liked Russell Mills’s collage) and then a history of the Abbot Hall collection from its opening in 1962. There were lots of surprises: a Ferdnand Léger lithograph of “Les Amoureux”, woodcuts by Monica Poole and a watercolour, “Greek Landscape’ by John Craxton,