A fleeting visit to Ferens art gallery, where I looked at some old favourites. The Blue Seascape is one I hadn’t seen before. I was wondering, though, if a stormy sea could ever be that blue. “Eileen Reading” has the air of a Gwen John painting in its indistinctness.
And then the normal ride to the docks, where we passed wind turbine shafts being loaded onto something or other (did it have its own engine or would it be towed?) presumably to be installed offshore.
This time we got off the train at Brough and cycled into Hull; I really didn’t want to cycle in and out of Hull again. Great views of the Humber bridge – and I had time to go into the Ferens art gallery and look at a painting by John Hunt of the waterfront in 1837. I got sidetracked by the steam packet on the far left: this went from Hull to Gainsborough, so of course I wondered how on earth it got to a landlocked town. Up the Humber and then up the Trent is the answer.
A quick visit to the Ferens art gallery this morning. An upstairs gallery had been dedicated as “the calm gallery” – art as an aid to mindfulness. Unfortunately they’d stuck an inflatable artwork in the middle of it; like a garish bouncy castle, it required air to be constantly pumped into it so the noise level meant there was no chance of hearing yourself think. As for the rest – the little time I had made me focus on just a few paintings that caught my eye. “Sunlight and Shadow” was so simple – geese for goodness sake! – and effective. And Wyndham Lewis’s sinister self-portrait has its home here.
And then more Hullish cycling – this time along the dock road, the A1033, mercifully furnished with a scrappy two-way cycle path. Where was all the traffic going to? Unlike Redcar, there was certainly still industry around – Siemens making wind turbine blades and Saltend Chemical “Park” – but beyond that I had no idea. We finally left that world behind by turning off to the village of Paull beside the estuary. It seemed like another world! Then inland to Hedon again (once a port) and finally to the ferry.
Old Shoe Box 