Skip to main content

V&A - amazing space

We walked miles today - excellent day out first at the V&A - one of the most amazing museums, such grandeur and such opulence and thats just the building.  we went primarily to see the Frida Kahlo exhibtion - and it was very interesting, there were less of her personal artifacts then I had expected and more (very beautiful) photos of her and her (less beautiful ) husband Diego Rivera.


It was nontheless a very good exhibition and gave a deeper insight into Kahlos life and how the pain and misfortune she suffered influenced her art.   She was indeed a very beautiful, talented woman and in spite of recovering badly from polio, being bedridden for over a year due to a serious motor accident, and having serious problems with her leg she managed a full and productive life .

She undertook lots of travelling, considerable paintings and it seems quite a large number of lovers.  Her injuries sustained in the bus crash incident left her body very damaged and she wore a plaster corset for much of her life.  She also identified very much with her Mexican heritage and affected to wear the traditional Tehuana dress all of the time.  This was in keeping with her colourful and obviously vibrant personality - it also served to hide her misshapen body and leg, and this look became synonymous as the Frida  Kahlo look.   The V&A had lots of her dresses on show, they were gloriously colourful with a lot of hand and machine traditional style embroidery - flamboyant flowers, beading and all in bright colours.  Kahlo was also very fond of huge wrap round shawls and wore a lot of big jewelry - some of which was on show.  Sadly photographs weren't allowed in the exhibition so I bought a poster and a couple of postcards... I was tempted by the book but in the end didn't succumb..
random flattened brass section suspended from the ceiling - this picture taken from above.. 
We wandered around the quite a bit more of the regular V&A exhibits and I took a really eclectic collection of photographs - its such a beautiful building full of such inspiring things and spaces...


We may have got carried away in th iron work section but the shapes were so lovely and were crying out to be transposed in some design work..

one of many pics of various iron works...

And then there were the stone heads taken from Salisbury Cathedral - they were just hanging there looking quite surreal - defo some potential for drawing

bodyless heads..

There was quite alot of inspiration for my (currently latent) mythical creatures series - lots of Asian art works, embroideries, clothes, statues and caskets depicting strange beasts - all photographed to be used at a later date for drawing and design ideas


actually there was just inspiration everywhere you looked - fab fab place - and then we went to the Natural History Museum - thats for tomorrows blog post...
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alesund

Our final destination stop was Alesund. This is a very pretty town in southern Norway built on a peninsula. All the houses are painted pretty colours and a lot of the architecture is all very Art Nouveau based. This is because the town itself was completely burnt to the ground In 1904 by a fire for which they never found the original cause. The whole town had to be rebuilt and this became a huge National Effort and a lot of prominent and up and coming architects flocked to the town to stick there 20 pence in. Consequently the town is very heavily Art Nouveau which was very fashionable at the time. There is this wonderful Museum just off the harbour which is a very beautiful Art Nouveau house. It has amazing panelling, doors, wallpaper, and it's all furnished with beautiful art Nouveau Furniture. It also house a collection of of enameled Art Nouveau Trinkets,boxes, spoons, jewellery, very very beautiful.   There is an interesting collection of old books and paintings a...
1 comment
Read more

The Blue Dot

Excellent evening spent at the first Blue Dot festival held at Jodrell Bank.  Clever use of the radio telescope as back drop for the main stage... there were some major teething issues which hopefully will addressed if this event happens again - mainly access and parking.. it was a nightmare approach to the festival and fortunately as we were only doing one night we decided to ditch the car and chose to walk the last mile and half into the site... what a relief as if we had queued we would most certainly missed Public Service Broadcasting which was one of the reasons we were going.. anyway we caught them and then enjoyed fantastic set by Underworld - danced much of the night away in the rain - my trusty solfest poncho almost kept me dry.. it was a splendid evening and the telescope looked brilliant when lit up when it got dark. There was a rather fab "installation" called a luminarium, lack of site information - another hiccup meant we were really lucky to catch it just ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Goodbye Dissertation!!!

The dissertation is finished...  it took me ages to do all the detail stuff Harvard referencing ect... the simplest tasks were starting to drive me mad!! I cant believe how long it took me to work out how to number pages excluding the first two pages aagghhhh...  I suppose I should be grateful that its not like the olden days where you had to get it typed and bound before hand in - this essay has been a hard slog, a subject which I felt was interesting - how the digital explosion is ruining traditional creative methods turned into a fairly unexciting - pretty boring unexceptional topic!  there will never be a next time but my advice is think of something funky - does Danny Boyle like garden Gnomes - Racoon meets Lady Gaga - anything that might surprise you but not too grown up!! I have worked hard and will be rewarded with a mid grade because there is no passion in this essay - the hard slog is evident as is the lack of enthusiasm - C'est la vie you cant win them all....
Post a Comment
Read more