In May I went on holiday to Italy where I stayed in a town, Montecatini Terme, that has a regular and reliable train service to Florence and best of all the journey time is less than an hour. Florence is a compact easy-to-walk-around city: here’s some of what I did on the days I headed off from base to explore it.
Filed under Artists, Restaurants/Cafés, Shops/Shopping, Travel
If you are visiting London and have even a passing interest in art you might like to hop on a bus, leap onto a skateboard or jump on a magic carpet and whizz on down to picture sellers Abbott and Holder. You will find Abbott and Holder in a charming four storey period townhouse in Bloomsbury a stone’s throw away from the British Museum.
I went to see ‘Cézanne et Paris’ an exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg (running until 26th February 2012) when I was in Paris last week. Cézanne urged by his old school friend Émile Zola to come to Paris, to further his artistic career, arrived in the capital aged twenty-one in 1861. From then on Cézanne travelled back and forth between Paris and his native Province, he did however return permanently to the landscapes of his childhood for the last fifteen years of his life. The exhibition is of Cézanne’s Parisian works and includes a picture of Zola; sadly the two friends fell out possibly because of Zola’s portrayal of an artist, loosely based on Cézanne, in his novel The Masterpiece.
I have blogged now for just over six months and those months have speed by at a spooky rate of knots. I know I don’t say this often, but I will today, thank you for reading Just Add Attitude, I very much appreciated that you do.
I have a reasonably optimistic nature. My glass is usually half full. One of the side effects of this optimism is that I tend to think ‘ I could do that’. Make a dress, paint a picture, fashion a piece of jewellery – no problem. I have in the past enrolled in classes to learn to do these things, with varying degrees of success. The life lesson from these classes has been that though most things may be easy to do, the real difficulty is in doing them well.
Filed under Artists, Craft, Musings, The Universe
The Picasso Museum in Antibes is enchanting. I was totally taken by it. The museum is in the 12th Century Château Grimaldi, a national monument that fronts the narrow cobbled streets of the old town and backs on to the Mediterranean Sea. The Château has a long history and as its name suggests the Grimaldi family of Monaco once owned it.
Walk for a couple of hundred yards in central Dublin and you will inevitability pass a couple of cafés. The quality and the price of the cup of coffee on offer will be variable. In almost all cases you will have to linger as you wait patiently for your turn for service and hope that there will be a table free by the time your reach the head of the queue.
“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”
Henri Matisse
31st December 1869 – November 3rd 1954
Filed under Artists, Favourite Quotes
On a crisp day late this January, I was walking down the Avenue Montaigne in Paris. I stopped to admire the Chanel windows, which showcased the Spring 2011 collection. My eye was drawn to the colourful backdrops. They were a perfect counterpoint to the ethereally pretty pastel-shaded clothes in the windows. I took some photographs. It was only when I uploaded these that I noticed the signature in the bottom right hand corner. The artist is none other than the talented polymath Monsieur Karl Lagerfeld head honcho at The House of Chanel
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