Thursday, September 30, 2010

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Sunday, September 19, 2010

ignorance is often more expensive than education ... i was fascinated by this large painting rescued from a ruined monastery at san pedro de arlanza near burgos and cleverly restored















http://art.mnac.cat/fitxatecnica.html;jsessionid=0f34369b92a1c918d6200caffe420f64deaa8eb20d894e8295f156e5369e3302?inventoryNumber=040142-000

and i was completely astonished when i found this picture taken by the rescuers before they started work

you can see where some plasterers had hacked into it before it was rendered over in the bad old days


















here is another fragment, now kept in the cloisters section of the metropolitan museum in new york ...


à la recherche ... should we envy the rich ? ... marcantonio raimondi, giorgione or titian, manet, and posy simmonds offer us "un petit déjeuner for thought"




























































... and,  by the way,  if you screw up your eyes, you can just about see joe and heidi in the background !



Wednesday, September 15, 2010

three more beautiful things ...
















Having nipped in to the National Portrait Gallery to see the twin Hilliard portraits of Queen Elizabeth the First in a very temporary conjunction ( they are not quite beautiful in their “much travelled” condition ), I am walking down towards the Underground Station at Embankment , and am mooching about with the camera by Charing Cross Station looking for a juxtaposition of the newly cleaned Charing Cross itself with the recently cleaned steeple of Saint Martin In The Fields. I am just placing the camera back in its bag when a half-forgotten half-remembered sound makes me look up just in time to see one of the last of the war-time Spitfires dipping its wings in a solitary high-speed fly-past. Hurrah for The Few !!!


On the westbound District Line train, an unusually smart, slender and suntanned girl enters, and she sits fiddling distractedly with a switched-off Blackberry. I measure her beauty with a draughtsman’s eye … and her elegant hands are nearly an inch longer than her face.


Just before she leaves the train at Victoria, a tall young Jeremy Irons look-alike moves towards the same door, and he is whistling a one-dimensional extemporized theme from that oh-so-catchy Bach Toccata and Fugue.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FXoyr_FyFw

barcelona stuff that's "fit to print" ... in no particular order