Having hardly made a dent in the V&A yesterday we decided to go back today and give it another shot. We took the glass elevator up to the six floor thinking we would work our way down, focusing on the ceramic and jewellery collections. it would be easy to spend a week there just looking at things Here is some of what we saw.
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After some browsing and attempted shopping this morning we took the bus down to the V&A for our daily cultural enrichment. Also had an excellent lunch sitting in the William Morris designed room in the cafe. Here's my V&A selfie. I think i'll have t Here's J in the plaster cast room trying to take it all in. They're doing abit of work so Jebus was strapped and padded. Didn't i see this at the Frieze Art Fair? Best Beard. And then we ran into our friend Bryan who is visiting London and spent an hour over coffee comparing travel notes.
After spending two days immersed in the art fair environment, the streets begin to take on a strange sort of surreal ambiance, where the planned starts to look accidental and the artificial starts to look intentional and real. Take this construction hoarding for example. It would have been perfectly at home in an art fair venue. The board is a photograph of a hedge and an iron fence, which then fails to disguise the piled construction cubes behind it. The lamp posts are real and even the little orange cone looks suspiciously arty. The flatness of the leaf photograph vs the reality of the hinges and lock are a classic modernist argument. But no one payed to see this.
One of the best things i saw today was on the way to the Frieze Art Fair. A couple of young artists had commandeered a bus shelter and converted it into a gallery. They were also helpfully giving directions to lost transit passengers. I won't even try to identify art and artists, just let it wash over you. and yes that's me as a fetus inside the womb. photo by SK. thanks for the VIP treatment Sara! Today J and I took a little train trip out to Kew Garden to look around. It was an overcast and slightly damp day which meant there were hardly any other people there which was very nice. We also had a really tasty lunch there which made looking at plants and buildings even more fun. When we got back into central London i went around to the Sunday art fair to have a look around. It was being held in some kind of underground parking or storage area, but there was some interesting work there and it was FREE! And last but not least was David Silver's installation DIG, put on by the Henry Moore Foundation and also located in a sort of underground building/storage/parking space. The space itself was very interesting and it certainly was nice to see work outside the white cube. After a visit to Tourism Island where J collected his travel pass, we headed over to the National Portrait Gallery where we saw these heads. and these heads.... and this guy who had a head and a body but seemed to be floating.... Then on our way to St Martin's Cafe in The Crypt we got caught up in this group of demonstrating teachers. J expressed his solidarity and then we went and had lunch. After lunch we went to the Apollo Theater on Shaftesbury Avenue where we saw an interesting production of "the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime". Here's how the set looked. There was alot of visual digital media in the show which seemed appropriate a the main character is an autistic boy who is a math genius.
It's going to take me a day or two to catch up on my blogging in London so in the meantime, here's one of the last still life images i did before i left Paris.
Just a hop skip and a jump under the chunnel and it's old blighty in just two and half hours. Arrived to find my jetlagged friend J already checked in a ready to go, so walked down the block to the British Museum for some coffee and culture. It was all a little too much for this lady who decided to have a nap in the cafe. here's my British Museum selfie. are you getting the theme here? J take's in the Elgin Marbles. After that it was time for abit of a rest and an early dinner out. Tomorrow is gonna be another busy day.
Catching the noon train to London to see Sir John and maybe some art fairs. Too-da-loo folks! ( ithink people have been rubbing his belly!)
ok, time for some more Proust. As you may remember, i'm listening to A La Recherche du Temps Perdu while i'm working, so i recently made another little Proust pilgrimage to the Musee Carnavalet to see the great writer's bedroom. Not actually his bedroom, but a recreation of it with some of his original possessions and furniture. As you may know his bedroom was lined with cork as he was very sensitive to sound. The building were Proust lived no longer stands but there is a plaque on the building at the location, so at least you can be in his neighbourhood. And here is some Parisian dust. This seemed abit disrespectful to Proust. My next art piece may be called "lint of Paris". After soaking up all that Proustian dust i took a few steps down the hall to what is one of my favorite places here, the reinstalled Hotel Wendell Ballroom, whose walls were painted in 1925 by José-Maria Sert. The walls and ceiling present a continuous scene that is absolutely stunning. The room is quite dark so apologies for the bad photos. And yet another selfie.
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Authora tale of the Canada Council International Residency in Paris, France. Archives
December 2013
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