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Visual pleasures of the last half week:

Behind Durham's Silver Street, as it climbs from the river to the Market Place, lies Fowlers Yard, where a single barn-like building and some small cottages have been converted into workspaces available to artists and craft workers who are prepared to open their workshops to the public. Last Friday they had an open evening, with free tasters of beer from the Hill Island microbrewery at one end of the lane and a jazz-flavoured singer at the other. In between there were tours of the tiny theatre, the chance to chat to Durham City Arts about this autumn's Literature Festival, and several artists. I was particularly taken with the most recent arrival, textile artist Julia Triston: she had just had time to paint her space bright green and shocking pink (a dramatic choice in any context, but more so when compared to the plain white walls everywhere else) and to hang one large work consisting of strips of connected squares in white, beige and black, overlaid with rich textures of black lace, white embroidery and pearl buttons - with a single thread of red snaking its way through from one end to the other. I would have liked to see the embroidered faces represented on her postcards, too.

On Sunday we went walking in Northumberland, a fine bright day riotous with spring flowers and dotted with pheasants out strolling in the lustrous copper of their Sunday best. Lambs craned their necks through the wire mesh of the fencing to nibble the stars of wild garlic that foamed by the roadside (self-seasoning lamb, how considerate!). We picknicked on the bank which had evidently been raised to mask the boundary of the parkland as seen from the windows of Ridley Hall, we clambered down Steel Cleugh and up the other side, we walked along the Allen Banks and came out into a meadow purple with wild pansies.

Yesterday Gail took me round the visiting exhibition at the University Gallery. The Sena Collection is a private collection which has been in storage for twenty years - and it consists of a grand total of ten paintings (eight oils, two watercolours), all nineteenth and twentieth century. As Gail pointed out, they had been bought comparatively recently, and although the collector was clearly wealthy, prices for first-rate pieces are now astronomical: they had bought instead sketches, studies or works by less-known artists. The star of the show was a study by John William Waterhouse for his Nymphs finding the head of Orpheus: there's a better known study in which Waterhouse tried out the upper part of the canvas, the nymphs looking down at their grisly discovery, but this is a study for the lower part, a slightly oddly proportioned pond in which a severed head and a lyre float among impressionistic lilies. Gail was very taken by a painting by John Simmons, in which a very pink fairy with flowing golden hair hovered above some photo-realistic honeysuckle, while I hesitated between Henrietta Rae's study for her Psyche before the throne of Venus (a lovely dream image, all smudges of glowing, translucent colour, which was probably translated in the finished painting to a classical formalism I would not have liked at all), and Frank Bramley's sketch for his Saved (a tearjerker of a painting in which news comes to the fisherman's cottage that the man believed drowned is in fact - saved! But I liked the light, and the glimpse of the sea through the open door). We were baffled but intrigued by a portrait by Robert Anning Bell and just plain baffled by a landscape by Sidney Richard Percy, which seemed to have no redeeming features whatsoever.