The Louvre is big. Really big. And it has some really big paintings. It’s not cluttered, but I kind of wish I could have taken the Segway tour of the Louvre. For my feet’s sake. There were also a lot of people there. We got there Friday morning after dropping our stuff off at the hotel, and the place was packed.
Not only does the Louvre contain a lot of art, but the building(s) and the gallery rooms themselves were often ornate works of art, complete with vast ceiling paintings a la the Sistine Chapel. Upskirt photography fodder for sure. We started at the ground level, where you can walk around the foundations of a recently discovered (1990s) old castle that once stood centuries ago in the center courtyard of the Louvre.
This is one of the funniest things I found about Europe. They seem to be constantly discovering the remains of old forgotten buildings under courtyards, cemeteries, and other structures. It’s not history sometimes until its forgotten and rediscovered, I guess. Given how hyper-recorded the current age is, I wonder whether any present day thing could ever be forgotten enough in order to become a subject for historical research.
So at the Louvre I ended up taking a lot of photos of ceilings by placing my camera on the floor. This became almost a sport for the both of us, sometimes Stephanie pointing out good shots before I even had a chance to look up. With all the people around, we often had an audience, at first wondering what the heck we were doing, and then getting that flash of understanding.
Here’s the inside of one of the glass pyramids.
The ceilings had a lot of gold going on, this one with an epic painting at the center, with bold colors.
They seemed to be fond of painting people floating, maybe because they were on a ceiling?
This painting, part of a much longer multi-painting ceiling, struck me as fairly modern in style, resembling the art I might see in a comic book or graphic novel.
This was at the top of a large staircase.
This does a good job of showing how a ceiling might have multiple paintings and sculptures integrated into it.
And finally one more, not a ceiling shot, but one of the glass pyramid set against the older building as seen through a window, with a few people taking a moment’s rest from the art around them.
At this point, I’m not yet sure if this is a wall for art, or a wall of art, but either way, I like it.
While shopping for Christmas presents at Kindred in Santa Rosa last month, I stumbled upon these beautiful placemats handmade out of recycled newspaper. Feeling that their aesthetics transcended their intended purpose, I decided to hang them on the wall.
I believe they were made by Filipino women as part of an cooperative organization that:
I just received my Winter 2006 copy of Sampler & Antique Needlework Quarterly. On pages 15–17 my mom’s Sampler Pin Cube patterns were published with a full page color photo. Pick up your copy today!
I’m not very good with decorating walls. I tend to find the irrevocability of pounding nails into them a little unsettling. That and commercial wall art can be so corny and expensive.
But somewhere I got this idea, I think from Casey, to accent a wall with a large piece of colorful textured paper. Almost three years and two bare-walled apartments later, I finally stopped by an art supply store on the walk home and picked up three large swathes of textured paper. They were only about $2-3/sheet, inexpensive and accessible enough to experiment and iterate.
I chose colors I thought were nice alone and together. Conveniently they resembled the colors of the furniture we have. Last weekend Stephanie and I alternated between holding them against a wall in various configurations while the other stood back and critiqued. In the end we opted for all three colors together.
We fixed the top corners to the wall with magic mounts, just to get them level and then sat down together to see how it all looked without hands holding them up. As we contemplated, a breeze from an open window across the room began to lift the paper off the wall in a most ethereal way.
We would have left them unmoored, except we knew they’d eventually tear off as we walked between the bathroom and the kitchen. After several minutes of watching the play of air on paper, we fastened the bottom corners to the wall.
In the future I’m thinking they may become canvases for other artworks or backdrops for framed photos.
Yesterday on Boing Boing, David Pescovitz posted a link to a Toilet Halloween costume, calling it “deeply depressing disturbing.” Even worse, the product description for the costume says:
A Child toilet costume is perfect for every potty mouth kid– Use as a modern day Dunce cap!!
Sheesh! Well back when I was a not-so-potty-mouthed-kid, my dad, brother, and I used to make realistic Halloween costumes out of corrugated cardboard and glue guns. And when I say realistic, I mean we carefully measured and enlarged the object we were building to precise scale. We’d go trick-or-treating around the neighborhood and at the local mall (apparently the place to show off our costumes) and collect candy from the stores.
For the Halloween of 1989, I was toilet and my brother was a hammer, which caught the eye of a photographer at the Poughkeepsie Journal, and we made it in the paper:
Note the toilet paper, Comet, and Vanish on top of the tank. Also, note that I edited the caption to correctly read that I was the toilet and my brother was the hammer, not vice versa.
