Donald Harris Prints and Drawings at Pistachio's

Where I live, in Brockley, South East London, there are a lot of artists. They seem to be attracted to this part of the capital. The great 19th century painter and engraver, Samuel Palmer, lived nearby. Goldsmith's Art College is just up the road. And if you climb the hill up to the top of Hilly Fields Park, which looks down over Brockley and Ladywell, you can see fas far as Kent. I sometimes think you could see as far as Calais, if the clouds didn't keep getting in the way. It's the kind of view that seems to have artists in mind, and certainly helps to give the area a sense of being part of London, but not quite of it. If you know what I mean.

Looking the other way, you get a good view of the Shard, London's newest and tallest architectural extravagance, glass facaded and jaggedy-tipped, rising in the distance like an abandoned Egyptian artefact, alternately shrouded in cloud and reflecting light like a garden mirror. Personally, I like it (although there are plenty who don't) for its arrogance and simplicity, and its slender elegance. I was waiting for six months or more for them to finish the thing before I realised that that was it. There never was going to be a point. The whole thing is pointless. Literally, if not figuratively.

You get a great view of the Shard from Pistachio's, a cafe that opened on Hilly Fields last year, replacing what used to the the loo. Every now and then they exhibit work by local artists, and the quality is surprisingly excellent. I say 'surprisingly', but given what I said in the opening paragraph, I suppose it shouldn't be surprising at all, given the number of working artists that populate the area. The current exhibition, by veteran painter, etcher and lithographer Donald Harris, is a case in point. The works on show are all monochrome, either etchings or pen and ink, with a couple of linocuts thrown in. The presentation's a bit higgledy-piggledy, but then what do you expect? This is a cafe, not an art gallery. The work itself, from tiny, scratchy landscapes, to larger, moodier studies of trees with boughs all twisted and overwrought, is quietly impressive. It carries echoes of an earlier, less frivolous time, when young men went to war and didn't come back. Hints, too, of Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore (his drawings), Walter Sickert, and the Arts & Crafts movement of an earlier century. David Hockney should check it out (see previous blog). Coffee's good, too.

Ciao for now, art fiends!