Tate Britain including Egg , Cooper Goth and # 69 sin

As well as screening a great Storyville on the 'US's War on Drugs' ( really interesting questions raised by this) the BBC had an illuminating documentary covering Roy Lichtenstein's Tate Modern retrospective which runs to the 27tth May.

I learnt that in fact Pop art was early too in the UK with artists such as Sir Peter Blake and that Lichtenstein was (along with Warhol)  were also somewhat ahead of the game in the 'sampling' and 'recycling' of commercial imagery, much as the way that Hip Hop cannibalises existing musical work Lichtenstein, magpie-like took the brightest and shiniest of cartoon strips and romance magazines and then  reimagined them as ironic commentaries on 20th century lives.

Alleluia

Today I visited a London Tate  not the Modern but Tate Britain, pictures that caught my eye included work by, along with of course the fantastic selection of Turner paintings  some other  works that I’m not so familiar with these included Thomas Cooper Gotch’s Alleluia  which looks so modern for a 1896 painting and  John Brett's British Channel strangely evocative.

The First Cloud

The first cloud (circa 1887)  by Sir William Quiller Orchardson who is  described here was a great narrative painter hailing from Scotland, the picture is one of a series of three that says so much about a relationship that you feel you are almost there and  sensing the distance between a younger wife and a wealthy husband.
Also catching my eye was the knowing Village Holiday picture of Sir David Wilkie (another Scot) from around the surprisingly early 1809.

After Lunch

Tate Britain in March sun 

More modern fare such as the photographic work Wolfgang Tillman's  Concord Grid (1997) were of interest but were part of a more conceptual theme and (for me)lacked the emotion of earlier practitioners as did the technically proficient  After Lunch by Patrick Caulfield.

As I know little of the creators of the work I was able to view the works without concerning myself with stories of the painters.


Okay so enough prevarication (if that's not a sin)..

Big Idea Number 69 is in fact Sin

Sin is surely a sign (according to most religions) of  a manifestation of spiritual weakness, in the Christian doctrine they're even numbered as 7 deadly sins.
There is though a difference between mortal and venial Sins which are defined by the catholic church as lesser sins than the mortal sin which remove one from God’s saving grace, the Catechism separates out these “lesser” sins in order to allow one to stay under the grace of God after committing a venial sin.  The assumption can therefore be made that if an individual by his own interpretation has committed only venial sin during his lifetime, he is assured of eventually inheriting eternal life. In contrast mortal sins will be serious, grave or mortal sin that are the knowing and wilful violations of God's law in a serious matter, for example, idolatry, adultery, murder and slander.