Rural Idyll and the Towner Art Gallery
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Today we took the train to eastbourne from Lewes in East Sussex, which for those that don’t know is in the South east of England. As you leave the town the country opens out, to one side is the foot of Mount Caburn, probably one of the most excavated sites in Britain. The summit of Mount Caburn contains an iron age Hill Fort that now is thought to have contained a site of ritual and spiritual significance, rather than a defensive site. On the other smooth flat pasture that is part of the flood plane of the river Ouse.
Ona sunny day as it was today, and without site of Pylon or machine it appears as a Rural Idyll, the flat grazing land covered in sheep and the steep escarpment rising to an ancient topping. As the train moves on the land flattens out further and i guess we were looking across the sussex weald. I doubt little has changed on this landscape for hundreds of years and something of its ancient feel where the sunlight glazed it and the sheep and horses grazed it seeped through the windows of the smooth air conditioned electric train.
The train sped on and we lost this rural retreat as we met the shabby sprawl that has become eastbourne and walked tot eh Towner art Gallery. A Gallery that has lost much of its charm, as it somehow seems both out of place and unfinished, unclear and undirected, with its tiny shop (compare it to the one in Brighton Library, never mind the one in Brighton Museum and Gallery) and wanting us to pay to go to an exhibition that it was hard to know might be worthwhile to see. This is not the Towner I remember. It has somehow lost its soul.
There art of the General collection is good and as a start for children it is worth the trip, but there was more art in those first flat fields of sheep as we left Lewes, but then perhaps there always is and Mount Caburn could never lost its soul.
