Shadows, Spins, and Flips

Today we met at Charing Cross tube station and went to the National Gallery to see two free temporary exhibits. First up was Tim Gardner, a Canadian whose paintings were eerily photograpic, even close-up. Next were Leon Kossoff's drawings of paintings held by the National Gallery. Kossoff's story is an interesting one, with him wandering from Hackney to the National Gallery in 1936, at the age of ten, with no recollection of how he got there. It was the first time he had ever seen a painting and it began his love of art in general, and the National Gallery in particular. From Trafalgar Square, we wandered a bit, stopping for coffee and then trying to decide what to do for dinner. We decided to have a sushi feast, but at London prices and Bob's sushi appetite, that means a buffet of conveyor-belt sushi for us! The place we went to was filling, but nothing special, and of course it made us pine even more for the wonders of Vancouver sushi. A phenomenon that I've not seen anywhere else in the world (and that I hope doesn't leave the confines of crazy London) is the tuna that passed us by in pieces like these on the light-pink plate:It's tuna straight out of a tin--bad, bad, bad! Strangely, proper tuna nigiri and maki made extremely infrequent appearances on the conveyor belt, but there were many plates with good saba and unagi nigiri (two of my favourites), so that helped make up for the lack of tuna. From the sushi parade, we made our way to the V&A for this month's special late night, held on the last Friday of each month. The museum's "Friday late" evenings are themed events, complete with interactive and multimedia activities, as well as music, drinks, and food that turn the whole place into a lively, cheap place to spend a Friday night. This month's theme was animation, and one of the first displays we saw was also perhaps the best: shadow puppets. Now I know you're probably thinking a) that doesn't sound like animation, and b) that doesn't sound too exciting, but consider that when participants placed their hands in front of this light, these were the types of puppets that appeared on the facing screen.

Entitled "Shadow Monsters," Philip Worthington's installation was brilliant fun, and although the monsters have emitted sounds in previous incarnations, that aspect was either turned off tonight, or was drowned out by the music all around us. In any case, I loved watching horns, eyes, spikes, and teeth appear from my hand as I moved it in front of the light. Various displays of animation were set up in different areas of the museum,

and we stopped for a while to listen to Jim Le Fevre explain his "phonographantasmascope," which turned the humble record player into an animation tool, as it spun around a zoetrope to produce simple movements, like those of this hurdler.
Audience members were encouraged to make their own, and round templates and instructions were passed around to those who were interested in trying out their own animation. Elsewhere, animation graduates from a London art school worked on creating a new piece of animation that reflected Raphael--they worked in the V&A from 1:00 P.M. today and screened their piece from 7:00 P.M. on.
Another fun part of the night was the crafty do-it-yourself flipbooks. People really got into the spirit of things and it was fun to watch the finished products on film, which will also be available for online viewing starting from next week. We started working on flipbooks of our own (Bob's features a man whose head gets progressively larger as his body gets progressively smaller, and mine is about the friendship between a bird and a fish), but they are still works-in-progress--speaking of which, if you've gotten used to clicking on photos in this blog to see more detail, you may notice that the enlarged photos are smaller than they used to be. I hope this won't affect your blog-enjoyment, but I just noticed that I'm already halfway through my blogger limit for free photo-storage (in just four months!), so some action had to be taken. :-)