Rome

My apologies for the lack of recent posts. I am on a two week trip around France, Italy and Croatia. I am currently in Rome marvelling at the works of Caravaggio and Bernini. Florence, on Friday, Saturday, was equally significant. It will take time to adequately respond to the justifiably renowned David by Michelangelo.

For more on the trip see my partner's travel blog at The Antipodean.

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Archive Bookstore

Five minutes walk from my apartment, on Bell St, between the Marylebone and Edgware Rd tube stations, there is a small bookshop with a basement: Archive Books and Music.

It is just as second-hand bookshops should be: cramped, messy, disorganised, books pouring out onto the street, and with that 'old book smell'. 

With a fantastic array of art books, philosophy tomes and novels, all very reasonably priced, floor to high-ceiling shelves and teetering piles of boxes hold endless promises of hidden gems. "A browser's delight!" indeed.

Down a flight of winding stairs is the basement where a plethora of used sheet-music - vocal, orchestral and otherwise - towers around a wonderfully old, out-of-tune piano. Music is heard from this dark basement as you browse away the hours upstairs, overhearing the owner and his assistant (dressed in a thick apron as if he were a carpenter) as they natter away with regulars on an assortment of topics. I will surely become one of those regulars, before too long.

Image:

www.archivebookstore.co.uk

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Break

"Art is the only way to run away without leaving home."

                                                 - Twyla Tharp

I am taking a short break this week. I am going to Germany. Posts will resume after the long weekend.

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New York City

“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.”

                                                                        - Thomas Wolfe

I am busy in New York this week going to several major galleries and seeing far too many Broadway shows. I will resume daily blogging on Monday, 4 April. 

Paul

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On the Road

“What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

                                                              - Jack Kerouac 

I'm going on the road. I leave in 112 hours. Qantas to LA, around SoCal and on to NYC, then London and the rest of Europe. 

I am busy with packing up our flat and good-byes this week, so the daily element of the blog will be on hold until next Monday (14 March).

By then I will be half-way around the world.

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My 'Grand Tour'

"Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose."

- Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

In a little over a month I will be leaving New Zealand. Travelling via L.A, Las Vegas, San Diego and New York, I will base myself in London to explore all that Europe - the birth place of western art and civilisation - has to offer. 

This will be my Grand Tour. It is a Pilgrimage, and the art masterpieces of the world are some of my key destinations. 

This blog will be my journal. I will study in depth one work every weekday, as I have done. The difference being that I will have the privilege of seeing these great works in person, a fact that will doubtless alter my view on them.

Before my departure I feel the need to anticipate the galleries and world-class collections I will be seeing first-hand. Over the past week I have explored five works from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I will continue this 'preparation' by looking at pieces in other American and European galleries. This week I plan to write-up five artworks from the collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Effectively homeless until I find a job and a flat in London, the vast and stable world of Art will become my home - simultaneously a mirror and a window onto the world.

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