Look Up! (14 May)

Today I was definitely still in jetlag land (wide awake at 5:00 A.M. after only a few hours' sleep) and it poured on and off all day long, but I still decided to head out to begin reacquainting myself with the wonders of London. My first stop was the Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House, a place that's long been on our list of places to see. Jonathan recently reminded me of the Courtauld and when I went to their website, I found out that the £5 admission fee is waived on Mondays from 10:00 A.M. until 2:00 P.M. (excluding bank holidays). That settled it! Set on three floors in a lovely building, the Courtauld is a wonderful place to spend some of your London time.

I quite liked these two Roger Fry paintings

and the colours in this Cézanne painting
reminded me of my surprise at returning to London after three weeks to find that everything has "suddenly" become incredibly green and lush: trees that were just beginning to bud when we left now create canopies over streets, which makes those streets seem oddly new and unfamiliar (in the best of ways). Other works that I particularly liked include this Van Gogh
and this Kandinsky.
When I left the gallery, I looked up and was reminded me of something else I have been meaning to check out in London:
One of Antony Gormley's eerie statues (at least I think it was one of his) was once installed at the foot of our street in Vancouver, in the sand just beyond and below the level of the seawall. Bob and I often went for after-dinner walks in our neighbourhood, and the first time we encountered the sculpture, which looked very similar to this one I walked past on Waterloo Bridge today,

it was a very dark, foggy night, and the statue's back was to us. As we walked past it, we almost didn't notice it, until I gasped and pointed it out to Bob. We had walked on the seawall just the other day and there hadn't been a sculpture in that spot, so we first assumed it was a person. It was so difficult to see and the sculpture was just far enough away that we couldn't tell if it was a real person or a sculpture. It actually frightened us! We stood, watching for a while, waiting for him/ it to move, until we finally concluded that it must be a sculpture. It wasn't until the next day, when we returned in the daylight, that we were sure that we had been looking at a sculpture and not a man in deep meditation. Apparently, some Londoners also had similar moments of confusion, as some people rung 9-9-9 to report a man in a suicide pose on top of a building. Casts of Gormley himself, the sculptures loom (mainly) over Southbank in an eerie way. There are three in this photo
and this one is near the National Theatre,
which boasts an art installation of its own: a lawn growing on the walls of one of its buildings.
Once I began looking up, it became difficult to stop searching for the figures in the sky.

Many of the sculptures are centred on the Hayward Gallery, where a Gormley show opens later this week.






There are two sculptures in this next photo, but I think the one on the right may be the one featured in this amazing installation photo. As with the sculptures that first caught my eye near the Courtauld, other figures look down from the north bank of the Thames:


When I got home, I wondered how many of the sculptures I had seen and tried to find a map of their locations. All I could find was this partial map and that there are (or will be--it's unclear as to whether all the sculptures are in place yet) 31 sculptures in the installation. London already has many, many reasons to look up, but a few more never hurt!