I’ve been writing a blog post about optimism, its benefits and the risks associated with it, but got somewhat derailed by some pondering about the National Museum Cardiff.

Earlier this month the museum was forced to close due to “a mechanical fault”. In the immediate reporting of the unexpected and urgent shuttering no indication of when the doors might reopen were given, and my heart sank, fretting that it might go the way of St.David’s Hall, which was closed due to the discovery of aerated concrete in its roof and its apparent mothballing (no remedial construction seems to have taken place in over a year).

I have a huge fondness for Cardiff’s National Museum, having lived in the city for over a quarter of a century. But it took me a long, long time after moving here to get around to visiting it. As is often the case when you live somewhere it’s only when you have visitors that you take the time to look at the attractions. I think that I made the assumption that Cardiff’s museum would be typically provincial, and have a selection of unmemorable local art and donations. I possibly heard it spoken of in glowing terms for its collection of pottery, which I doubt would have made my twenty year-old self dash there post-haste, it preceding the wonderful Great Pottery Throwdown.

What I hadn’t heard about was the incredible donations made to the collection by Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, who were early collectors of impressionist art. As such, Cardiff’s free museum hosts a truly breathtaking assortment of paintings by Monet, Renoir, van Gogh and Pissaro, alongside sculptures by Rodin and Degas.

So I remember (hazily) the first time going round it with some friends and us all being astonished at coming face to face with Rodin’s “The Kiss”, and some of Monet’s waterlillies, and also being whacked around the face with some of the finest contemporary art in the form of the Artes Mundi exhibition. 

It’s a little haven of tranquility in the busy city centre, and the free entry encourages people to pop back in to visit (and revisit), whenever they’re passing.

Over the years, I’ve had numerous “favourites” that I’ve made sure to check-in on whenever I’ve popped in. Most recently I’ve found myself drawn to the paintings of Gwen John, a truly remarkable artist from Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire. Her works tended to focus on women in modest interiors painted in subtle, almost hazy colours. The small painting of “Girl in a blue dress” is my current touchstone, which seems to reveal more each time you return to it.

https://museum.wales/art/online/?action=show_item&item=1018

Pre-Christmas we had a trip up to Hay-on-wye to catch a gig by Josienne Clarke and I picked up a copy of Gwen’s biography written by Emma Chambers for a Tate retrospective. It was fascinating to learn of her development as an artist and her singular life, but one part stood out for me which discussed her working methods in 1916.

“I think a portrait should be done in one sitting, or at most, two. For that one must paint a lot of canvasses and probably waste them.”

This section made me think of some of the ways my coaching sessions regularly skew. The client is often reluctant to start on a course of action or piece of work without some certainty that the plan or the project is the ‘right’ one, or perfect in its conception. The very nature of coaching is about planning an approach, so I’d not want to overlabour the spontaneity aspect, but often the plan that a coachee goes away with is a way to ‘try something out’ and be curious about how it turns out. It’s only by having a stab at something and then coming back and looking at what worked, what didn’t, and what you might want to change that you make progress towards your eventual target. If what you tried didn’t work, that’s still valuable, as it showed you a path that wasn’t worth pursuing (at the current time). It removes that option from your brainspace and lets you get on with focusing on other tacks.

As coaches, our role is often to make the actions that our clients take feel achievable and safe. They might not always work, but you’re rarely worse off for having tried. Indeed, the process of coaching can help people to thrash out and minimise the downsides of a course of action, which (as neuroscience has now shown) a person can tend towards overcaution or catastrophizing.

Fortunately the museum was only closed for 5 days, but the prospect of it being out of reach has made me vow to appreciate it more, while we have it. (Here ends the tripadvisor review for the day).