Weekend in London

We got up in plenty of time to get to the train station. I packed my backpack for the weekend, ate two pieces of toast and set out with Tabitha. As we approached the bottom of the hill we saw the #120 driving past. No worries…another one will be by soon. So when we boarded the next bus we still had adequate time. As we disembarked I saw a clock (we have no timepieces except Tab’s iPhone) and realized it was 10:15 and it left at 10:27. No worries…we had prebooked the ticket and just had to pick it up at the kiosk, and it’s a small station. But of course, the kiosk wouldn’t work with our credit cards (we are both having a lot of trouble with that) and we had to wait for an attendant. Thankfully, there was another train that left at 10:35, and we made that one instead.


I sat across from a young guy with a red/blue rep tie and very polished black oxforda who was talking quietly to himself. I pegged him for a lawyer going to London for a case. It turns out he was a lawyer who was going to London for a job interview, and he was going through his answers. We talked for awhile and he got his jitters out. Before long he was on his way to his interview, and Tab and I were hitting London.
We picked up an Oyster card for the public transit, and went to a hotel-finding service. After haggling with Ivalyo of Bulgaria for awhile over the price, and after he threw in breakfast, we settled on the Rockmont as inexpensive enough by London standards, but not sketchy. It was near Victoria station, and Tabitha liked its proximity to the Queen. With me navigating we made one wrong turn, but realized it fairly quickly, and before too long we arrived.
Tabs and I split up for the rest of the day. She went to the Tower of London for the afternoon, and I went to the Tate museums. Although I enjoyed the pre-Raphaelites and the Turners, I was underwhelmed. It seemed like the collection was small in the kinds of works I really wanted to see. I had seen more pre-Raphaelites in Washington, and more large Turners in Paris. So after awhile I headed for the Westminster tube stop in order to get the subway to the Tate Modern. However, while at Westminster, I decided to wander around a little and get a few shots of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. As I approached Westminster Abbey (closed to visitors) I noticed a that it was almost time for Evensong. So I decided to stay for the service. I got to listen to those lovely choir voices, heard at the Royal Wedding, fill Westminster. The acoustics were phenomenal. It was such a treat.
I made my way over to the Tate Modern. I really just wanted to see it, housed in a a converted electrical building. I’m not a huge modern art person, but I did see several big names in the modern art movement…. May Ray, Gerhardt Richter, Mark Rothko, Picasso, etc. But only rarely does modern art move me (especially countered against the choir voices at Westminster), and so I didn’t stay long.
Tabitha and I met up at the hotel room for dinner. We just walked down the street to a Cyprian restaurant and it was fabulous. We shared a plate of delicious Yogurtlu Tavuklu Beyti and called it an early night.
Saturday we enjoyed a fabulous breakfast, where we sat next to a nice Australian couple from the Gold Coast. Of course, since Grayson lived in Surfer’s Paradise on the Gold Coast, we had an immediate connection and visited for a long while. After breakfast we tried to make some travel arrangements but without much success. So then we left for the day and went to Buckingham Palace and saw the changing of the guard. From there we walked up the red road to the Wellington Arch, and to the Houses of Parliament. After lunch, we walked through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, to Notting Hill. Tab’s knee had been getting increasingly more painful for her over the day, and I feared she wasn’t going to make it to Portobello Road. Obviously the bargains and shopping there got the best of her, and she forgot her knee momentarily. After an unremarkable dinner, we thought we’d go out on the town. However, with little entertainment budget, we wandered around Carnaby Street and people watched. In the subway station, we were going down the escalator while a woman (who otherwise looked sane) was trying desperately to go up the down stairs. Not sure how that ended up working for her but we heard her clomping up the risers until we boarded the train. We got a good chuckle out of it.

Sunday, we had another great breakfast and decided to hit a museum. I had never been to the Victoria & Albert, and Tabitha didn’t care. (She had seen Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, and the London Eye. She was satisfied.) Some of the V&A was tedious (really? An entire wing of ‘Ironwork’?) but there were some really great aspects. One was the amazing jewelry collection. The other were the two exhibitions going on. Tabitha went to Yohji Yamamoto’s fashion exhibition, and came away inspired to pull out the sewing machine and sign up for Project Runway. I went to The Cult of Beauty, a magnificent exhibition of the pre-Raphaelites. Lots of my faves were there: Burne-Jones, Alma-Tadema, Rosetti, Whistler, Leighton, William Morris, Julia Cameron, etc. It more than made up for the dearth at the Tate (and maybe that's where the Tate ones were hiding!)

We visited over lunch with an elderly London couple; she remarked that she had an American Army boyfriend during the war and I asked, “His name wasn’t Herb, was it?” Her husband laughed and said, “No, and it’s a good thing. Then I wouldn’t like you so much!” We enjoyed Victoria’s own recipe for sponge cake with strawberry/cream filling, and it was to die for. We left the museum thinking that since it was such a lovely day we should head to a garden and walk. We went to the Chelsea Physic Garden, and on the way passed the Chelsea Flower Show. I would have loved to have had tickets to that! (I bet they let Obama go on Tuesday when he gets there, but for me, they were sold out!) So I can honestly say I went TO the Chelsea Flower Show, but not that I actually went in. ☺ From the Garden we caught the bus back to Victoria Station for our subway to St. Pancras and ‘home’ to Sheffield.

I decided that yes, I could live in London, for 2-3 years but not forever, if I lived in Chelsea or Notting Hill or somewhere like that (high on the quaint factor). So if anyone out there on the internet has a great job opening in London, for an American, I’m all ears!

Chatsworth House, Derbyshire

If you have an ounce of a soul in you, you'd probably enjoy Chatsworth House, at least today. Today was filled with gorgeous art and baby animals and gardens and beautiful spaces and flowers. After a WARM night (must have worked to our benefit that I tipped up the furnace) Tabitha and I woke happy. Lisa, our hostess, drove us down to the bus stop to catch the 9:12 to Chatsworth House in Peaks National Park. It is the ancestral (and current) home of the 12th Duke and Dutchess of Devonshire.
After a lovely half hour drive in the countryside, we arrived before opening. We got a cup of coffee/tea and wandered through some shops, then into the gardens surrounding the estate. We lucked into arriving on one of the days of the "Florabundance Festival". Even though it was raining, we walked for several miles admiring all the landscaping and flowers in bloom and baby animals (lambs and ducklings). The home exterior was undergoing some renovations, but the gardens and interiors were still fantastic. The tulips were all in bloom, along with about every other flower you can imagine. It was really incredible. Reminded me a bit of Biltmore House, Versailles... you know, houses and gardens erected by really rich people, who now must let the likes of me inside their homes, in order to pay for them!
We dined at the restaurant and then tackled the house itself. The art collection alone was worth the trip: from Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Franz Hals, and Correggio, to Joshua Reynolds, David Hockney, and Lucien Freud. Then there were the awesome interiors. Then the gorgeous flower arrangements. Just my cup of tea, for sure.

Oh, and be sure to watch the upcoming documentary about Chatsworth House on the BBC. It will feature all three of these feet.

Metaphor: Fear

This assignment was to take pictures of metaphor. Unlike in past years, this year they gave the class a theme. I found it hard to portray fear (or do they want us to elicit fear??) without turning to cliches. And to portray fear in a universal sense, yet having that sense informed by my personal choices. Not sure whether I succeeded or not. I'm posting more than my usual five because I haven't yet decided which of these to turn in as my final 5. After you look at them, I'll give my comments of what I was going for. I'm sorry I downloaded these in small format...I am not sure that Pictures and Busted I & II really come through in this small format.

Bedroom Floor:


Bras:


Busted:


Pictures:


Hand:


Busted II:


Porch:


With Bedroom Floor, I was challenging myself to take a roll in the house...to find fears close to home. In my bedroom I laid on the floor and pictured the aftermath of an event (a robbery? a heart attack?) and what that would be like. The idea here was to show the disorientation of not quite having your bearings. Thus the odd focus, odd perspective thing.

In Bras, I had a few thoughts in mind. One was breast cancer, or the thought of mastectomy (and the bras therefore being irrelevant). Another thought was the empty nest...fearing that I'd no longer be needed, that I myself might be irrelevant, once my nurturing role was done.

Over the weekend, we went to the ACC tournament in Charlotte. Leaving the arena, we passed the bus station and found some happenings going on. Lucky for me the car was nearby with my camera, so I got out and tried out my future in the growing field of papparazzi. In both Busted I and Busted II, I tried to capture the feeling of vulnerability this woman must have felt, and her fear of what would happen in her run-in with the law.

In Pictures, I set up a shelf of my family photos so that none of the faces except Grayson's was actually visible, and tried to make his eye the focal point of the shot. I fear for him in the Marines (well, I fear for him anyway because he is fearLESS, but being in the Marines exacerbates my fear). There's always a pang in my heart when I view his official military portrait, knowing that if something happened to him, it would be the published picture in the newspaper. Maybe that's morbid, but it is what it is. Because this fear is more personal to myself, it might not be the best one to put in my portfolio....I don't know.

Hand is another shot taken in my bedroom. It's supposed to be ambiguous and elicit unease. Again, it could reference someone trying to escape an intruder; it could refer to falling or losing one's orientation; it might be a plea for mercy; it might reference feeling sucked into a vortex.

There's a small old house on a busy street near me. It is unoccupied, so I stopped one afternoon and took quite a few views of it. This was my favorite, and I was trying to illustrate a fear of abandonment.

Pinhole camera: Landscape

Pinhole camera: Self-portrait

Pinhole camera: Editorial

Pinhole camera: Close-up

Pinhole camera: Still Life

Pinhole camera: Geometric Distortion

This series of photos were taken with a homemade pinhole camera, for my class. I made mine out of a long skinny cardboard box, and therefore my shots are long and skinny! The pinholes were fun, but oh-so-labor-intensive! The original out of the camera image is a negative. These are contact prints made from the negative image. Only one shot could be taken at a time, then processed to see if I guessed the exposure correctly, so there were quite a few out-takes on these. They're difficult also because there is no viewfinder... I had to guess that my box was positioned correctly to get the image I wanted, not the sky or the dirt or whatever. But after hours and hours (and peeling fingers from all the darkroom chemicals!) I ended up liking these. I only posted one in each category: the assignment requires five in each category for a total of 30 usable shots.

I like how the collection hangs together. In all but the landscape there is an enclosing curvilinear form, and even in the landscape it is enclosing if not curvilinear.

Photogram: Free

Photogram: Round

Photogram: Self Portrait

Charleston landmark

This fountain is at the Charleston Place hotel. I stayed there last weekend with my friend Kathy at Renaissance Weekend.

A Better Shot

I'm submitting this piece 'Fragile' for publication in an online art journal operated by the school I attend, to be published in the spring. I took a new shot of it, which is far superior to the picture I posted back on November 11. I'm also submitting the cityscape I posted -- I've named it Emerald City, a play on my town's name of 'GREENville', and because I did the piece on a green pastel background. Also, there are a few parallels, living here, to Oz that I won't go into!

Fanciful light fixture

Semester's End

As the semester winds down, I'm getting back some of the work I've turned in. I thought I'd post a few of the pieces here.

Colored Pencil still life. This piece may not look it but it took FOREVER to complete. It was done with 8 colored pencils. In retrospect, I should have 'zoomed in' so I wouldn't have had so many different subjects to render.




"Emerald City"
You might remember this from a photo I posted here on my blog. The assignment here was to render a scene in linear perspective, from real life. We had to show something in one point perspective, something in two point perspective, something in three point perspective, cast shadows, and reflections. Since my town is "Greenville", and the large glass window is green, I drew on a green surface, and thus, the title.


This is a study of texture. The assignment was to FIND 10 textures (not to arrange a still life or whatever) and to recreate them in a charcoal or graphite drawing. This is Bill's junk drawer. If you look closely you'll see a candle, a key, a lock, a watch, a crumpled receipt, a lifesaver, some sock holders, a miniature Eiffel Tower from his 40th birthday trip, a backroller, a pair of glasses, a spool of thread, and a shell from Edisto.

Connected

Tony Cragg, World Events, 1996

Glass, my version

It's a lousy picture, but here's my graphite version of the glass still life I took the other day.

From Open Studios

Once a year over a hundred local artists open their studios for a weekend and allow the public to view their workspace and talk to them about their pieces and processes. Although I've got jet lag pretty bad, I went to my art teacher's studio and found these pieces that would look smashing in my bedroom. Unfortunately, there's no money in the budget right now for bedroom art, so I'll probably not be able to get these. But I do think they are cool. Her name is Enid Williams, just to give credit!

Wednesday's: Glass still life

This is the set-up for the drawing I'm currently working on.