Bartimaeus

With Glow over and the weather cooling, we chose an art gallery for our last full day in Eindhoven. Gentle walking and not too long seated suited my back. If we had been aboard, I think I would have had to do a lot of driving or we wouldn’t go far. I was unsure how I would fare on the journey back but I had started on some stronger painkillers. 

The Van Abbe art gallery was not far away. We had passed through its doors on the first night as it was also part of Glow, but that did not show us any of their art collection. Shane was slightly out of sorts with a cold so gentle strolling at our own pace seemed to work even if the art app didn’t. For some reason it didn’t accept my surname as a surname and I could make no headway with the form. I don’t know where Shane’s attempts to engage with it broke down but he gave up on that installation. We decided just to explore ourselves without it. Everything had dual Dutch and English labelling anyway. 

An effort had been made to add value for the visitors with visual impairment. That’s a pretty hard call for a visual gallery so I have no idea if they were successful in making it a place of interest for people who cannot see any exhibits, but it added some interest for me to have some paintings reproduced, so that could be touched. Whatever material they used felt lovely and smooth.

I’m not knowledgeable about art and they were in any case deliberately including lesser known artists, historically not included. I did recognise one. I wondered particularly what the response might be to the touch version of this. The form and structure is easier to see in the human subjects and regular geometric pattern above.

The day before at the park we had seen some artwork on an underpass of broken up features, birds in this case but mismatched with different species. Not quite picasso but had a disarming effect nonetheless.

Some paintings in one room were accompanied by scratch and sniff cards designed to evoke the feelings that the picture might, an interesting concept for me, but less accessible to Shane with a cold, suffering from a different sensory impairment. He doesn’t have a very red nose here though. Did someone paint his portrait while I wasn’t looking?

At (late) lunch time we found the cafe, where with unusual swiftness, I had chosen what I wanted from the menu on the wall. Both soups, right at the top, looked good. I was moving to a table, to find that Shane had not fancied anything there and so we went in search of somewhere else. I wasn’t actually very hungry so a delay was not a problem. The next place we found had already closed its kitchen…it was a late lunch and getting later. We went back to an old favourite that had served us breakfast on our first day and one other. They greeted us warmly with “hello again” and I still found a nice soup. The staff there have a lot of artwork on their skin.

Though we had been here nearly a week we still spotted new things, in places we had already been. Art was everywhere, not just in the gallery.

In the evening we went back to a pub we had been to on our first night and been back since. Shane wanted to go back and I knew what I had fancied but not yet chosen so we both had different meals there again, but the same friendly service. The staff remembered us and could remember the beer that he had recommended to Shane last time, when Shane couldn’t. There are still things we had planned to see, do and eat so I could happily return.