That was me today! Except I know how exactly how I got here - caught the red double decker bus number 11 so that song could keep playing in my head and I could see what the singer was on about.
Before I'd gone to the consulate with an almost complete stranger today, I had planned to meet my friends anywhere of their choice, with my only request being that the place be somewhere "iconically London". When it was time to finally meet I snapped and backed out on the phone and made myself purposely uncontactable for the rest of the day.. just because a plan hadn't been made, I think. Why snap? Been in a bit of a bitchy mood these past few days. Tried to attribute it to rainy "London weather"! jk there's a heat wave.
If I were them I wouldn't have had a plan either. After that call I sat in Starbucks thinking up a plan for an hour and then giving up the planning and taking the next bus to anywhere. Plans complicate everything. You just end up anticipating, and then you break when a minor detail goes wrong, which it often does. I tried to get to Piccadilly with that red double decker but ended up following the tourist couple in front of me to get off a few stops earlier at Trafalgar Square anyway. Okay not that relevant.
I took myself to the National Art Gallery of London, where I stayed right up until it closed and I'd still not seen everything in it.
This stuff was the kind of art I liked. Monet, Manet, Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso, Van Gogh, Boticelli. Oil paintings, Renaissance, impressionism - hundreds of years old, capturing things that have fascinated everyone universally. Facial expressions, people, nature, Christianity. I particularly love Van Gogh - I'm going to study his life one day. He was untrained and unappreciated all throughout his life, lived so poorly, contemplated priesthood, yet he could paint like no other. He just perceived the world differently, literally - he suffered from epilepsy and psychotic attacks, and I love that we can experience just a bit of what he saw. The same simple subjects, just stroked on a bit differently, yet still recognisable (pay attention Picasso).
I loved Monet of course. His experimenting with different lighting, studying the composition of light and colour in water and simple floral gardens. I loved that I got to see his actual house and garden, Giverny, while I was in France, so I had a comparison. To be honest, I couldn't draw direct comparisons. The garden was stunning sure, but Monet really did make it his own.
I compared this with Degas' "Beach Scene". The scene was completely imaginary! He didn't have a direct physical model in front of him, which I think is pretty clever. I also love his ballerina dancer series, where he could emphasise beautiful movements using pastel through textures and blurry contours.
To funk it up a bit, there were these cool peep show perspective boxes by a Dutchman, van Hoogstraten. It was a play on optics and perspective, giving the illusion of a 3D interior of a Dutch house. It forces you to move your eye at the right angle through the peep hole to get a better view, like how our eyes would do it naturally. Genius.
Art galleries are cool because it's that place you can wander around aimlessly, mapless, and still manage to not look like you're completely lost to the strangers around you.
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