Andrew Bamji: another poem, and some information on the author

In the Gallery

I have an admission.  I really love Titian, and Renoir, and even Van Gogh,

But I’ve not got real urges for splodges and splurges so Rothko’s stuff turns me right off.

I’d love a Canova – be rolling in clover if I could own Rodin’s “The Kiss”,

But Lucien Freud makes me very annoyed. I’d always give his muck a miss.

So off to the gallery (maybe with Valerie) to find something I can afford;

A Grimshaw, perhaps, or some nice Cary maps with which I would never get bored.

I would even consider, were I highest bidder, a Victorian landscape or two;

What would also be awesome – a Montague Dawson, with clipper on ocean so blue.

I am sad a bouquet by Renoir or Monet would require I dispose of my house

And a Rembrandt or two would leave me quite blue and as poor as a little church mouse.

So I wander each room in a deepening gloom hoping finally I will uncover

A masterpiece lost (and at very low cost) which has not yet been found by another…

But it’s all modern stuff! And  there’s more than enough of Damien, Francis and Tracey

(and anyway most of the work they produce is rather unpleasantly racy).

And the last on the wall isn’t painting at all! An Offili, all tickle and slap;

At the end of the day I can honestly say it’s a terrible load of old crap.

AB

Andrew is a retired consultant rheumatologist  who lives with his wife, (Liz, also a retired doctor), in Rye. He has written a lot in his retirement, including a polemic about the shortcomings he observed while working for many years in the NHS, (Mad Medicine), a thriller (Anything but a Quiet Life), a history of the pioneering work by Harold Gillies,in plastic surgery on soldiers wounded in WW I,  (Faces from the Front) (Andrew gave a talk on this subject to the Second Wednesday Club.), and The Doctor's Doggerel, a collection of "Wry Verse".