Tranquility Bay was not too tranquil at the surface yesterday , but what goes on beneath? The National Marine Aquarium, in Plymouth is featured in a T.V programme. Our watery neighbours serendipitously revealed on television.
There is a tank dedicated to the waters of Plymouth Sound so it is possible to see who else is in the water when we bob.
We never see Starfish unless a deceased one washes up on the beach but we do see and occasionally feel the remnants of jelly fish.
There is something peaceful about these bobbing neighbours of ours. They quietly go about their day while the bobbers excitedly swim about just above their watery realm. We tend to imagine bigger more troublesome things. The trouble is, of course, more in our imagination than in reality. We invade their world noisily and with a lot of splashing, quietly observed by sea creatures going about their lives with far less fuss.
When we moved house from the actual Old Mortuary we bought a house with 7 Chandeliers. After 2 years we have got that number down to 4. We are not Chandelier people. I don’t have a fear of Chandeliers, and one of my favourite comedy moments involves a Chandelier.
I love a big, grand Chandelier like the one above, ours are poor imitations and rather effective as dust catchers. I have created a Chandelier black hole for this blog, I was looking for the opposite of serendipity. I wondered how to get there. Coloured glass was my route.
After a few days in Venice, where this Chandelier twinkled for us, we had seen more coloured glass than was good for us.
I had rather hoped to see some gorgeous contemporary glass but if there was anything beyond the predictable temptations for tourists we didn’t find it. So without being able to show you gorgeous glass I will share another video . Dale Chihuly in Venice. If you have the time follow the video trail that Youtube offers. Some truly great art.
Gorgeous glass in Venice. If you watch the video you will notice that the artist wears an eye patch. By an awful quirk of fate a shard of glass from a shattered windscreen blinded him in one eye.
An artist blinded by the medium that made him famous.
Quite the opposite of serendipity which , thank goodness, takes us to the black hole at the centre of this blog. Zemblamity
Serendipity comes in all shapes and forms. This question landed just as I had done the morning dog walk.
A beautiful creamy morning in December. Such a fab illustration for a blog with this question at its heart.
I am neither a night or a morning person. Greedily I love both. Once I passed the age of 30 it was obvious that I could no longer have both with the ease of youth but I can still happily enjoy the night until it bleeds into the morning. 2 or 3 am can be vivid in a way rarely found in their pm counterparts. The jolting, head nods of the early afternoon are one of my worst pieces of behaviour. They have plagued me all my life. How dreadful is that?
This morning as I wrote on the first day of December, I was warmly snuggled under my duvet feeling like bobbing was not the best idea when the temperature was 0 degrees C. How wrong could I be. Tranquility Bay was as tranquil as a summers day.
All the attending bobbers made it to the buoy at least once and still managed an enormous amount of nattering.
As usual the subjects were broad and wild. It’s amazing how vivid conversations can be after twenty or so minutes of really chilly swimming. As vivid as the tidal pool was on our departure.
And I have created two baubles for the #Celebrating Serendipity Chart. This morning I had no idea how December blogging was going to go and now I have a bauble chart. Days really do take the strangest paths sometimes.
On the threshold of the festive season and where to take pondering for a whole month.
The picture above was serendipitous about a month ago. The incoming tide created a meandering tide mark that leads the eye to one of my favourite local doors.
Celebrating Serendipity and where it leads me is going to be the theme of the 31 blogs that will ease us into 2024.
The first few days will still draw heavily on my recent Italian trip but who knows where serendipity will take us. This morning at 0 degrees I already know that life and not serendipity is going to dip me in the sea.
But back to last weeks serendipity. An Andy Warhol painting that caught my eye. Not to be too self absorbed, but Illeana Sonnabend, an American-Romanian Art Dealer, born in 1914 was a doppelganger for me in the 1980’s.
As luck would have it there are no retrievable photographs of me in that era but if me and Illeana were in the same room and at the same age you might easily mistake us for twins. Serendipity at its very best.
One of life’s pleasures, of my sort of aimless wandering in a foreign city, is indulging in capturing the textures, colours and experience of inconsequential but interesting things.
I loved the texture created by the loss of mortar between the bricks of this wall in Venice. Texture and ginger colours was a bit of a thing for me on this particular day. I was able to see the original painting of a mythical bird woman by Max Ernst.
The imperious bird-woman commands our attention with her direct owl’s gaze, and seems alarmingly about to step out of the painting. The robe depicted here may refer to the mystic initiation of Christian Rosenkreuz, founder of Rosicrucianism. It seems also to have autobiographical allusions, with the artist present in the green swan or heron. Much of the highly textured surface has been created by decalcomania, a technique of dabbing at wet paint with rags or paper to create a puckered surface. The comprehensive meaning of this painting eludes us, as is characteristic.
Max Ernst’s paintings often baffle me, but even when reproduced the textures he creates are thrilling. To see one up close and actually see the picture in person was a fabulous treat. But as a word collector I was almost as thrilled with the word ‘decalcomania’
So much to take in, in one walk. Time for refreshment. Which turned out to be just one more moment of inconsequential discovery. My poor old post-covid taste buds long for anything that stimulates them into action, however brief. Ginger is a regular drink of choice and the fierier the better. There was an Italian soft drink that promised great things with its name.
Gingerino offered not a glimmer of ginger but it was one of the bitterest and delicious things I have tasted in a long while. Despite its nuclear colour I was hooked and rather giddily had another. Sadly it seems my discovery was just a very brief holiday romance. Gingerino and I will never be reconnected in the U.K.
A day of remarkable ginger texture is definitely a day well spent.
Todays blog subject is almost the complete opposite. Easy Jet decided at fairly late notice to cancel our flight home, giving us additional time in Venice until an alternative flight with a different carrier. Next door but one to our hotel there was an exhibition that would probably never be on a ‘must-visit’ list.
A replication of a 19th Century Venetian Portrait exhibition last curated together in 1920. Proximity to our hotel was key as we had agreed to meet some fellow abandoned travellers to share a water taxi when we discovered we were all on the same alternative flight. So we walked around Fondazione Prada the central bigger building in the picture above and visited Ca’ Pesaro the smaller white palazzo.
We could easily have filled our time in the Modern Art galleries but the deeply pigmented colours of the walls of the portrait exhibition lured us in.
Who wouldn’t be lured in?
What a revelation. The vibrant wall colours absolutely focussed the mind on the gloriousness of traditional portraiture. The anonymity, to us, of the subjects somehow made the whole exhibition easier to view. We even noticed an anomaly.
Was she lonely and just decided to sneak in the back with the joyful family?Maybe we could have found the older man too?
Real credit to the curators for making unknown portraits interesting. Just one room differed in layout from the 1920 exhibition. Maurizio Pelegrin, an installation artist born in Venice created a space with a very different feel. Like a squirt of lemon on a rich and unctuous meal. Just perfect.
I suspect I will ponder Italy a lot this week. There were a lot of sights, sensations and experiences to process. If I had to come up with a hierarchy of words that might sum up our experience. Contradictions, Amazement, Luxury and Beauty would all be at the top of the list. Rome gave us hotel luxury. When in Rome stay at The Hoxton. Surely the most comfy of communal areas with fascinating books to browse, while our feet recovered from our twenty thousand tourist steps.
With dedication and the Citymapper App we criss-crossed Rome and caught sight of many of the traditional bucket- list tourist spots. I use the words caught sight because the historic locations in Rome are all being treated to renovation work. So without queueing in the long queues for each individual location it is very hard to see anything as there are just miles of 7 foot high wooden hoardings circling the perimeter of every famous site. So I would say we glimpsed Roman antiquities from a distance, from the perspective of the many hills that we traversed. An evening trip to the Vatican City was not something we planned but when in Rome why not.
Spotlessly clean and very white, almost sterile with no fuzzy warm feeling of centuries of humanity coming together for worship. Curiously the feeling was more of a banking global HQ.With a rather fancy doorman. We did find a warm fuzzy feeling in a nearby cafe. Simple good food, great wine and a somewhat idiosyncratic decor of framed Disney jigsaw puzzles and many photos of the Pope kissing small children.
All the carb we could possibly need to fuel our walk home. Which took in a detour to the Trevi Fountain.
Which in turn required a few more calories. The Trevi fountain is fabulous in unexpected ways. The building and the fountain both morph out of the same mishapen and craggy marble boulders. All that skill!!!
I think this blog is a summation of our Rome disappointments, but for every disappointment there werealso hugely interesting unplanned events.
Just one more disappointment to get out into the open. A Contemporary Art Collection that was mind- blowingly empty of art and pretentiously full of arty-farty bollocks. But if that was a big low point it led us by way of a scruffy poster to tomorrows blog, a real unexpected treat.
Finding ourselves in the corner of an Art gallery.
After Coffee and Architecture the hunt for Art Galleries and tiny gardens was our motivation and route maker in Venice. The Peggy Guggenhein Collection was a fabulous destination because,not only did it have all three targeted pleasure points, but the building itself it was also the subject of a book I had chosen as my holiday read.
A faacinating book because so many of the artists who were previously unknown to us, and many who are well known put in frequent appearances in the book. Palazzo Venier was the home to three unusual art and artist-loving women. Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse and Peggy Guggenheim.
The corners of this Palazzo hold so many secrets. I am not sure about defining interesting women by the amount or variety of sexual partners they have. But while living in this very peaceful and calm building these women lived quite the life. And goodness me this book tells the reader that this house has seen some action. Not just artistic types either. Churchill visited for R and R and happy endings when, given that he was a World Leader his mind should quite properly have been elsewhere.
The last owner before this home became a gallery is buried in the beautiful garden courtyard with her beloved dogs. Which answers, for her, the question below.
What are your favorite animals?
After an international life of great wealth and the friendship of some of the world’s most famous artists. Peggy Guggenheim chose to be buried beneath Venetian skies with her pet dogs.
It is easy to imagine how that decision was made. There is an astonishing sense of peace and calm under the blue skies of a November day in her last resting place.
My favourite painting from this particular collection of hers is also superbly peaceful. Which proves, I suppose that peace can be found anywhere if you look hard enough.
We have certainly done some steps in Italy and there are many blogs to follow when the ponder is upon me.
Pigment store in Venice
When we were in Rome we pondered ancient civilisations and contemporary art. A quest that was largely successful with some fabulous surprises thrown in. Our last Art gallery before a train trip to Venice had a prophetic slogan on a T-Shirt.
As luck would have it we were off to the Biennale, but not the Fine Art one with National Pavilions. The Architecture Biennale offered cool spaces in beautiful buildings many of them being restored. No t-shirts with instructions were available which rather allowed us to do as we wished
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