Ten minutes before hitting the Tube station, we'd had a long talk about how to meet up with each other if we got separated... the easy answer is of course just to look back for Rebecca's hair. :-) In a moment of irony, the two women went through ahead of me, and my Oyster card ("bus pass") denied me entry (I had run out of money and hadn't noticed).... the line up to re-nourish my depleted Oyster card was long, and the women were gone...Arta, though, in typical Arta way, had decided for fun to see how easy it was to find me, and had noticed I was gone. They came back, spoke to me through the barricade, and we sent Wyona ahead to wait in the ticket line up while I lined up for the Oyster card. Nice start to the day... way to practice finding each other after getting lost.
Just proving that different paths do not always run at the same speed, Arta and I somehow still managed to arrive at the Leicester Square before Wyona.Go figure.
So... tickets purchased, we split up for the day: Wyona to visit her favourite scarf sellers (What?! More scarves?!), and Arta and I to visit the National Gallery.
One of the recent 'installations' at the national gallery is the "Eco Art" outside. VERY westcoast!
They have planted grasses and small mossy growing things all over one of the walls of the building.
Not sure how visible it is in the shot, but the effect from some ways back is a bit like a Georges Seurat painting... it just looks like a lovely watercolour painting. Pretty groovy!
Arta and I have not spent much time in museums TOGETHER (as adults, that is... i certainly spent time following in her path of educational exploration as a child...you know, "fossil rock walks in downtown Calgary", "identify bat guano in fish creek park", etc).
But it was a revelation to see that she is just as bad as me in her desire to consume til your belly/brain explodes.
In between our own wanderings, we took in the 10:30 and 2:30 guided tours, each of which offered a more close exploration of 5 or maybe 6 paintings.
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| Christ Healing the Blind Man by Buoninsegna |
The first one we saw has Christ healing the blind man.
It is fun to look at the conventions for telling story through image: here, you see the blind man both before and after being healed.
The panel that goes beside this one has Christ appearing to the apostles.... when they are set along side each other, you can see that the "healed" blind man is looking up at the body of Christ in the panel along side.
Fun.
We also learned that this was painted on wood, which was then covered with linen, and then covered with plaster to make a smooth surface to paint on. The paint was egg tempera, which would give you vibrant colours, albeit without tons of nuance: the paint would dry very fast, so you only had a short time where it could be pliably worked).
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| Annunciation of Mary |
We listened to a nice discussion about the number of people who would have participated in making the painting.
Different artists in the studio would have done the people, and the buildings (would would have had painters specializing in buildings)
Then we moved up a hundred years, to spend time with the Spanish Bartolomé
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| St. Michael Triumphs Over the Devil |
The feminist in me was so happy that the guide did eventually take us to a painting by a woman artist!
Here were looked at a painting by Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755 - 1842).
This is a self-portrait of her, but she is also showing off her skills as a painter by making hers a version of a similar painting by Rubens, on the right of the gallery and which you can see beside her in this post.
What she was doing here was making a 'calling card'.
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| Self Portrait of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun |
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| Artist: John Constable |
I will not be more specific re which of the drawings below belongs to Arta and which belongs to me... but I think Wyona was arguing that one of the paintings looks less like 'the woods', and more like a Judy Chicago plate! You can see that neither of those two women was taking my artist production very seriously.Artists.
They are never appreciated while still alive...
I had forgotten that we had lost Rebecca before we even got out of the starting gate at the Earl's Court Underground Station. And yes, she is right, we had decided that it is easier to find her because of that red hair and I was practising doing so within 30 seconds of making that commitment. I was only down one set of stairs and Wyona was down the stairs and half way along the train platform, so I was looking ahead to keep my eye on Wyona so that I could stop her and looking back at the same time scanning the early morning commuter crowd, trying to figure out why I couldn't see that flaming red hair of Rebecca's.
ReplyDeleteWe had also committed ourselves to that other method of finding each other -- the one that says, when you figure out you are alone, just stand there and hold your hand high above your head and the rest of the people will retrace their steps until they find you -- a method that also works since I have tried it many times, both as the lost person and as the adventurer, looking for the lost person.
Ah, sweet London.
This is also the day that we were to meet Wyona's at Melanie's Restaurant, near the theatre where the Jersey Boy's are playing.
ReplyDeleteWe anticipated a lingering and early supper before going to the theatre. But on making cell phone contact with her, we found out she had hurt her foot on the escalator again, and had limped back to the hotel to bite the pain by laying on her bed for the rest of the day.
Rebecca and I caught the double decker down to the Strand so that we could see "Love Never Dies", her for the first time, and me, for the second time ... of the new revised version, that being the sixth time in all.
I feel as though this is a guilty secret that I should never tell, but before the show began, a person sitting in front of us interrupted our conversation since he wanted to get in on the "show talk" that we were doing. He flies in regularly from Texas to spend 8 days just going to shows and had already seen it more times than I, though this was his first time of the second version. Hearing that was like salve on my guilty conscience.
"I will have to give you spoilers," I said, when he asked me a question about how I liked the new version.
"No," he said, "let's talk after the show when I have had my own initial reaction to it."
"Not fair," cried Rebecca."I have been asking her for spoilers all day and she won't breathe a word to me."
I know not to talk in the middle of shows, and in this instance, Rebecca and I were third row from the front. All the more reason not to whisper to anyone. We had purchased our tickets at the half-price booth in Leicester Square, but even at half price, it felt as though the pocket book has been hit by a bullet. Still, I want to lean over to whomever I am with after the Phantom's opening number and say, "Now, that song alone is worth the full price of any ticket in the house", but I keep quiet.
Love Never Dies is my top pick for London musicals, even though I prefer the first version still, over the second.
Ah, sweet London musicals.