The paintings were decidedly Post-Impressionist, determinedly Symbolic and inherently Divisionism...ish. They were....excellent as you would expect world class art to be. The highlights were, of course, those famous pieces that are recognisable to event he most uneducated and ill-informed plebeian (which is why I knew of them...).
Van Gogh (which sounds like one clearing phlegm from their throat) stole the show with his Starry Night and self portrait, but we were equally impressed by a number of pieces by Roussel and Denis that were precursors to the Art Nouveau style (inspired by Ukiyo-e)
But art is art...and that was only part of the experience. We arrived on Saturday afternoon and found that there was a significant line of people waiting to see the exhibition. It looked far too long to join and still expect to see a single Cezanne before the Gallery closed so we bought our tickets for Sunday instead.
"Why is the queue so long?"
"Because of the long weekend."
"It's a long weekend?"
"Where are you from?"
"Sydney."
"It's a public holiday on Monday for everywhere else but NSW."
Lesson 1 learnt. Always check before you plan your trip...A: is it a public holiday where you are going, and B: is it school holidays where you are going.
Having learnt our lesson well, we decided that we would arrive early before the Gallery opened on Sunday so that the time spent in the queue would be shorter. If they only let in 500 people at a time...the line will move faster in the morning because the exhibition won't already be filled with 500 people. That was our cunning logic...cunning....like a fox.
We left for our $99 special secret LastMinute.com hotel room to find that whilst we were at the NGA, a function had started at our hotel, and all the parking was full. I was livid...the Good Doctor a little less so. I had the strange idea that if I had paid for a hotel room to stay overnight....I should have a right to park on premises..not three blocks away because some slack jawed rural bint was having her 21st birthday or worse, a wedding reception, in our hotel.
So I furiously parked our car three blocks away and sought refuge in a bottle of light beer (I was driving after all). The pizza and warm oily nuts calmed me somewhat and by the time we walked back to the hotel I was resigned to the fact that it was a pretty shitty hotel and this is what one should naturally expect from Canberra. The used dinner plates left out in the corriders of our floor only confirmed this when stumbling out the door at god awful o'clock in the morning they were still there.
We did however, learn something that night. We don't really like Goth clubs anymore with their monotonous and boring post-industrial/EBM/Noise/I-installed-fruity-loops-on-my-computer/anyone-can-be-a-DJ-with-a-premixed-cd music, and the people wearing plastic hair and the entire Lip Service catalogue all at once...
I mean...there used to be some sort of style, effort and interesting music played at clubs....oh well...kids these days eh what?
We arrived the next morning at 9 am (for a 10 am opening) and joined the already considerably long queue. As we waited the line grew, and grew, and grew until it stretched around itself twice.
We waited...
and waited...
and waited...
...until we finally stepped into the gallery at 11:45 am.
It was a nice exhibition.
I could say more about it..but unfortunately it was just nice. The paintings where there, but there was no explanation to the order. The audio tour did not provide any insight into the works (an awful lot of time was spent describing the painting as though we were physically unable to see it in front of us - although there was one blind person there with their guide dog) and at the end we were confronted with Starry night PVC aprons (flashbacks to the previous nights Goth club) and Cezanne pencil sharpeners.
We fled.
Our day of queues did not end there gentle reader. Oh no. Not by any mark.
Just outside of Goulburn we hit another queue that crawled....
...and crawled..
..and crawled through 20 kilometres of traffic winding it's way past the site of a rather banal and un-fatal accident between a truck and a car.
Our 3 hour trip back home took exactly 6.
I do however feel decidedly British after our weekend experience. We would have only had to complain more and eat chips to have the total experience.
A thought for next time.
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