Last dose of culture for the year

Weekend before last, me and my pal D went to the V&A for a dose of culture. Seeing as London is going into tier 3 this week (all indoor social venues will shut again) it was a good call, as in the in-between periods of various levels of lockdown and social distancing rules I’ve been making sure that I’ve kept myself topped up on the places that bring me the most joy. We started with lunch in the courtyard (stunning, isn’t it?) and felt like we were somewhere in Italy. A very cold Italy.

As we were sitting there I saw a guy take a picture of himself with a self-timer, which made me remember my favourite button on the camera. I placed it on a table and ran back for this shot, and we came to the conclusion that from now on I shall always take a self-timer pic of myself whenever I bring the camera somewhere, as I barely exist in pictures.

The V&A is my favourite museum in London; I’ve gone there so many times in the past 28 years, and I still haven’t seen everything. I do feel I’m getting close though, and it’ll be so weird when that happens, but I’ll keep on going, and besides, my interests will keep changing so different parts of the museum will appeal. D took me to the Cast Courts, which I’ve somehow missed in the past, and this is a cast of Trajan’s Column in Rome. It was way too high to show in one piece, but the room was still built high enough so it could be shown in two halves.

Making casts of famous world artefacts was a way to show non-travelling Victorians art and sculptures from around the globe, which is kind of ironically apt for these times we live in too. Like I said, sitting in the courtyard made us feel a million miles away from London, so seeing these golden doors and other casts must have been a wonderful window into what else was out there in the late 1880’s.

Hiya Dave! You alright? I doubt I’ll ever go to Florence so looking at this cast model of Michelangelo’s David is probably the nearest I’ll get to it. I never knew the proportions were so all over the place.

This cast of the baby Jesus (although I would argue that his face is very un-baby like here - look closely and you’ll see what I mean) being kissed on the foot by one of the three wise men made us giggle. The beard makes it look like he’s about to take a huge bite out of little fella’s foot. Actually, maybe he already got the right hand? Nom nom.

I can’t remember where these heads were salvaged from, but they were modelled on the carvers themselves, their friends and family. So cool to think their faces are still here, hundreds and hundreds of years later.

This carving was apparently put up as discouragement for stealing back in the day. There are so many brilliant parts to this carving. Brilliant and funny.

There’s a whole section dedicated to iron work, and this gate caught my eye.

As did this miniature carving, not much bigger than a walnut shell. So cool!

The photography section is really great, and I love this collection of old photographs where you can see the shadows of the people taking the pictures.

Mark Cohen’s colour photography from the 1970’s is a total new find for me. This wall of pictures made me sigh and wish that I was more loose with my picture taking again, like I was pre-blogging. My pictures now sometimes feel so boring and functional. I need to fix that. I just watched a short clip of Cohen taking pictures and it horrified me though. So intrusive! You’d get punched in the face if you did that now, but seeing him not looking through the view finder reminded me of my Lomo days in the late ‘90s, and how fun that was. Maybe it’s time I set myself some challenges from this book which I’ve had for years but not used.

Anyway, anyway, anyway. The last room we looked at was the Tapestries Room which is amazing. The walls are covered by huge Dutch tapestries from 1500, and they’re mind blowing. My head hurts just thinking of all the work that went into them. Pressing the button on a camera is easy yo! Blog post title aside I still have a backlog of my cultural highlights of the year (including another V&A visit in September), so at least here on the blog there will be more culture coming for sure. And hopefully some wonky pictures too :)