A glorious day was in the offing. Francine was keen to exercise her artistic gene by visiting Tate St. Ives and, if you’re going to end up wandering about a town in the open, this seemed like the perfect opportunity.
There is a very good bus service running, about once every hour, right by the entrance to our campsite at Godrevy. The bus takes you through Hayle and on into St. Ives. We’d already used the bus to get to Hayle and back so now it seemed less scary – to me, that is – Francine was quite used to buses. The buses seem to run on time and you can track them. Excellent! We caught the 10:20. After 35 minutes we were deposited at what St. Ives refers to as a bus station. At least we now knew where to get the return bus.
After an excellent coffee overlooking the harbour, we wandered down into the town itself, naturally looking in nearly every shop window [not me, you understand] making our way to said harbour. Francine and Google teamed up to get us to the Tate St. Ives building.
Francine is already a member of the Tate so her entry was free but she had to pay for her accompanying artistic numbskull. The lady on the desk seemed pleased to have a numbskull showing some interest.
I had seen pictures of a display that I did think I’d find photographically interesting, It was an installation by Aleksandra Kasuba consisting of a series of 6 stretched fabric, tall conical shapes illuminated by coloured neon lights. You can walk through the fabric shapes.
From my point of view, the remaining mostly more conventional artistic exhibits were less interesting, certainly less understandable, and many of their explanations by the artists were the usual intellectual babble clarifying very little.
On our way to the Tate we had spotted what looked like an interesting harbourside seafood restaurant offering tapas style dishes, the Cintra Seafood Bar. Sunny St. Ives was very busy so Francine had popped in to reserve a table for lunch. Leaving the Tate, we headed to the Cintra to claim our table inside, looking out at the harbour view.
The bar’s “small plates” section is essentially a collection of tapas items. There are some meat dishes but the seafood looked irresistibly interesting. Less interesting were the prices but, hey, you only live once. The menu item that had initially attracted us was Cajun spiced monkish. To that we added pan-fried scallops, Cornish mackerel fillet and salt & pepper squid. To our selection, the restaurant added a complementary amuse-bouche of cods roe crostini [essentially taramasalata, though not dye pink]. We washed it down with a Portuguese vinho verde. We were going to finish with espressos but they also had affogato on the menu. Well, rude not to. We thought it was all excellent, which softened the financial blow a bit.
Mr Artistic-Numbskull’s fun wasn’t over yet. Oh no. St. Ives is also home to the Barbara Hepworth Museum & Sculpture Garden. Entrance to this museum is covered by the Tate membership.
Mr. A-N was, of course, completely unfamiliar with Barbara Hepworth’s work but I think he quickly got the hang of it. First of all, grab a large lump of rock. Second, punch a large hole through the lump of rock.
If making a hole in the rock proves to be too difficult, just stop trying to go all the way through and leave a nice round, saucer-shaped dish in the surface.
Sometimes your resultant rock with a hole in it might look a little bland by itself. If this proves to be the case, stretch a few crisscrossing strings across the hole, supported around the edges of the hole, for added interest.
Job done.
As we approached the St. Ives bus station our number 14 was in and waiting – perfect timing.
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