oh, hey mr darcy

We went to Chatsworth House

                                   (the lady readers would know it as Pemberly)

Today I pretended to be Miss Elizabeth, strolling through the gardens of a great house and vast green gardens - all of the girls did, probably. 

lalala (emotional music and creative cinematography panning the ceiling) lalala

Poor Lizzy didn't stand a chance, this place is oozing romantic notions.

remember the statue room? from the movie???!

 

 

 

 

an english painting place

I spend lots of hours in here

(the sunlit studio procured for the nurturing of  creative thought)

 It's a place for painting, and more of that sort of thing accomplished by art students.

Sometimes Miss Eve comes to paint and watch movies with us. 

We all watched Tangled today, and drew pictures.

I love love love it when she asks to borrow my gesso. It's adorable. 

her toes and her paintings

(and herself)

 foot picture, in honor of Brynne

 and some projects of mine

today

the weather sounds like Beethoven's Seventh Symphony   

(the Allegretto, of course)

 it's dark and bright at the same time

(this is how it looks)

  

this is real life

This is what it's like being a student of Peter Everett's:

If you're me, you wake up after breakfast (later than everyone else) and run to class in your slippers with your fuzzy, sleepy hair stuck to one side of your head, and you're only awake enough to yawn all the way through the critique. 
What's coming up next (what's coming up next should only be deserved by people who are alert and prepared) - he briefly instructs you on behavior around special collections art that will be displayed at the British Museum - he has called ahead and arranged for several originaldrawings - by Michaelangelo and Raphael and Bruegel (Dad, you would've died) and Van Gough (and Rubens and Van Dyck and bel Sarto and Rembrandt and Peruzzi and Verrochio and le Lorrain and Millet and Durer and van Ruydael) - to be brought out from the museum's catacombs of artistic history for his students to come and study.
Today my face was inches a way...maybe less...from penned sketches done by masters from the Renaissance. My fear of them and my flabbergastedness made it difficult to breathe.

Study for Adam, Michelangelo Buonarotti, 1510

Elck, Pieter Bruege, 1558

La Crau from Montmajour, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

gosh, right?

sightseeing

So, maybe today I got in trouble with a guy dressed up in Medieval garb because I was trying to sneak some photos of the crown jewels.

(this is the only photo he let me keep from the exhibit after flipping through my "illegal" shots)

  Ijust thought it'd be fun to photograph some rocks that are worth more than ten of me (eleven? twelve?).

Anyway, we went to the Tower of London today (the morbid little fortress where dear ole Anne, and others, got the chop).  

Last night we saw Shakespeare's Richard III at the Old Vic (oh, hello Kevin Spacey, you are Richard III. And Mrs. Dashwood from Sense & Sensibility as the ragged Margaret? Hello to you too), an artistic and captivating performance that made today much more interesting for me.

In the play,Richard of Gloucester kills nearly everyone in his pursuit of the crown, including his two small nephews (the tiny dukes of York).

Today, in the Bloody Tower, we saw where they were banished and where they mysteriously disappeared (their quiet deaths are still not proven to have been by evil Uncle Richard's order, though he seems to be the most likely suspect).

interesting

 

Maybe a few of us got carried away running off Muppet Treasure Island quotes, who knows how it even came up. Clueless Morgan. 

               

mum and dad, this is for you:

I ate fish & chips today, didn't even hate it (what's more, this was at a pub formerly frequented by the Dire Straits, which I had to pass George Orwell's flat on Portobello Road to get to). Thank you.

referencing george orwell's "shooting an elephant" - deciphering silence

 (the things we think about in writing class)
Peter and JB have been asking us to figure out silence and write about it.

I think of growing in silence as a discipline. It is uncomfortable, even when we are responding to something, because we are forced to come face to face with the deepest reaches of ourselves - the dark things we hate, the annoying habits that we can't seem to tame, the rawness of us, us the way we are. Maybe I'm just talking about myself here. And all the rest of the world who can't sit still and just think in a quiet place for long enough to make anything meaningful out of it.

Through learning our silence, learning to embrace it and soak it in and accept what comes with it, we can learn to be teachable, to be open, to direct our thought and focus toward importance (like a painting hanging on a wall, a few words lost in the fine print of a heavy book, maybe someone around you who is struggling). I want to get better at learning in silence, or just experiencing it I guess.