Today

8.17am

On the way to the Ponds for a dip this morning, with 0 degrees in the air, 6 in the water. Glorious.

14.45pm

Best leg warmer there is.

An arty November Sunday

Let’s continue with back tracking through my 2019, shall we? On a Sunday back in November, we went with a couple of friends to see the Antony Gormley exhibition at the Royal Academy. I’m lucky enough to be able to go to exhibitions on weekdays when it’s less busy, but we this time we went on what must be the busiest day in the week. It was actually quite nice to feel more collectively that we were sharing an experience with a lot of people at the same time.

Our friend’s daughter mimicked the statues throughout the exhibition which made us chuckle.

Most of the rooms were so busy that you had to simply walk behind each other in a circle to have a look at whatever was in the middle, like some sort of circle dance.

I have no idea how they managed to fix most of the art works into the spaces without wrecking the place, and I must say I enjoyed the contrast between his modern sculptures placed within the very classical Royal Academy.

Here we had to squeeze our way through, walking around the perimeter of it, in a neat little line.

This room could only be seen though a door opening, the whole floor was filled with water. Would have been fun if you could wade your way through it :)

We couldn’t figure out how they’d installed these thin metal rods that would span across four rooms or so, without them bending at all. So much of Gormley’s stuff makes you wonder “What the?! How the?!”.

I think this was hand drawn with chalk. Made your eyes hurt.

My favourite parts of the exhibition were his early watercolour work, as well as his notebooks. If I was to steal one thing from the show it would have been this last rusty coloured painting. Ha - just realised that it’s yet another painting with someone facing away, and here in silhouette, which reminds me a lot of a certain someone’s photographs… hmmmm.

December randoms through my camera

Hej and welcome to the new chapter of my funny eye! After almost 11 years on Blogger I’ve finally jumped ship to Squarespace, which for a technical dunce like myself seems to be the most logical platform, and the fact that I can archive the old blog here is huge bonus. Don’t want to lose all them years of posts innit. Please pardon the messy layout in the archive though, but life’s too short to fix it, and this is aaaaaall about the present! Anyways, how are you? Excited about the new year and the new decade? I am. Even though the world is pretty awful at the moment, I’m settling on being an optimist. I still have a huge back log to post (like half of 2019), but I thought I’d start at the end, with a selection of images from my December.

Went to see Dora Maar at Tate Modern at the beginning of the month. I didn’t think it was particularly good, but I try to see as many exhibitions by female artists as I can, as they’re chronically under represented, and I find it interesting and inspiring to see the work of women.

Checked out Dora Maurer there as well.

A December sunset at Primrose Hill.

The light was so good on Christmas day. I was not in blog mode though, and besides, our xmases pretty much all look the same anyway, so these three will have to represent the day…

In the days between xmas and new year everything slows right down, and I enjoy the quiet for about 48hrs, but after that I start to feel really sluggish. I know that all it takes to feel better is to just walk out the front door and take myself for a walk, but it took about five days for that to happen this time. Actually, that’s not true, as I did go out for my cold water swims over the holidays, and that really helped. Anyway, the day before New Years Eve we met up with friends and went for a long walk on Hampstead Heath, which cheered me up no end.

At one point we took a little detour, and Oomoo helped out a squirrel who had been chased up a tree by a cat. Here he’s trying to let him know that the coast is clear.

And there you have it - some of my December seen through my camera. See you very soon.