Midsummer Medley

Cambridge this week had all the essential components that go to make it a strange yet wonderful city. Traditions - 800 years since the charter was granted for the annual Midsummer Fair, a degree ceremony handing out honorary degrees to the great and the good, May Balls in the oldest colleges. Tourists - parties of foreign exchange students, coach loads of more mature visitors and a few independent travellers all begin to descend just as the students leave for the summer. Traffic chaos - pedestrians and vehicles alike struggle to get around with the city so busy and this was made worse with the closure of the A14 on Friday afternoon.

All of this made for an interesting couple of days. A short walk from Michaelhouse to the Fitzwilliam after lunch on Thursday turned into an obstacle course and leaving the city by road on Friday was one of those Cambridge experiences I could do without. All said, it was great to be back on tour there and the work on William Blake progressed as hoped. Pleased to find myself at a halfway point with the initial research on 6 of my 12 focus paintings already complete and still just a third of the way through the sabbatical.

A pause now until the next phase of the Tour begins mid-July. Centered on the South Coast I'll be visiting galleries in Southampton and Chichester, studying art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Pre-Raphaelites, Impressionists and Post War Britain all fall into the remit - more familiar territory than the Italian Renaissance so looking forward to getting started on all of that.