Chocolate roulade.

There were some fun elements to my day off like a trip to the Foundation to browse round the goodies in their shop, buy a stripey cotton top, have cofee in the café with a healthy slice of chocolate roulade, not too sweet, not too rich, not too heavy but nice and dense... and finally a turn around the new Art Centre which is very impressive. Their first exhibition is of work by John Byrne, a favourite customer of mine, a nice chap and a real gent. It was no surprise to learn that early in his career he got an exhibition at the Portal Gallery on the grounds of being a self-taught 'naif' although he was a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, was awarded the Newbury Medal and a travelling scholarship which enabled him to study in Italy. Nice one John! He went on to design record covers for the Beatles, Billy Conolly and Gerry Rafferty (who I have never heard of but I suppose others have) and to become a writer of stage and screen productions. His paintings are very large scale and several I couldn't live with, but I definately liked his potrait of Billy Conolly on loan from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. I would put a photo of the catalogue pic here only - well, I'm not sure about copyright. I also liked his more recent depiction of his twins, charming, tangled-haired waif-like creatures of indeterminate age and sex (I'm told they are roughly eleven and roughly male/female) in a very different style to the pop art paintings of the 60's. The twins are the age for being slim, boyish, and half-way-between-worlds but their ambiguity is possibly heightened by inheritance. Their mother is Tilda Swinton who played 'Orlando' in the film made of Virginia Woolf's long love letter to Vita Sackville West. She perfectly, wittily, depicted the ethereal hermaphrodite beauty of the sex-changing, century-striding enigma.

The gallery was such an unusual experience for me that I felt as if I had briefly visited another planet and was much better for it.