I love art--old art, new art, graphic design, and crafts. When I get a chance to travel, I take every opportunities to look with my own eyes at the art and architecture that I grew up only seeing at in books or on tv. This page has a list of some of the places I have been (from the top of the Acropolis to underground in the palace cisterns of Istanbul) and selection of my photos including this one of Vincent! If there is an area that you are interested in, please ask even if we are not covering that location in your grade this year.
On March Break in 2016 I went with Montcalm students and staff on a quick tour of London and Paris with a stopover in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland. Mrs. Charlton, our organizer and guide, planned some wonderful stops at cultural landmarks and museums.
I got to see multiple paintings by Vincent Van Gogh with my own eyes! There were many other great paintings, especially impressionist painters, but the part I did not expect was how interesting it was move around the many sculptures they have.
Even though I was named after the Mona Lisa, in real life it is not nearly as impressive as Winged Victory, a statue I fell in love with in a grainy photo of my art history text in grade 9. The Mona Lisa was behind glass and a gate keeping back the crowds but Victory was in the open at a top of a staircase and I could sit on the short wall beside it and study the metal braces that were used to reconstruct the wings from the back.
Highlights: seeing how small the Rosetta Stone is and how large the Assyrian winged lion statue are. I planned the entire trip around finding the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon and there is a funny story I'll share in class about what really happened.
This famous monument is covered with sculpture you can't really appreciate in photos. I spent a lot of time photographing these.
Our group got a little off track on the way there by train. Mrs. Phillips came to the rescue jumping back and forth between the cars at stops to co-ordinate our large group getting turned around. When I first saw Donald Trump's taste in interior decorating it reminded me so much of this French king's palace. Maybe the purpose of both was the same.
There had been terrorist bombings in Paris this year, so outside this beautiful church were soldiers with very large guns. Inside a choir was playing and we sat for awhile and listened mid-way through our tour of the interior. The interior was much darker than I expected, making me wonder what it was like for evening serviced in the times before electricity.
It was strange that at the Opera house of Paris, I found the grandeur and style that I had been hoping from at the Chateau de Versilles. This is an ornate and theatrical building with a cohesive style. It is known for the story of the Phantom of the Opera, but it was the way that it knows its purpose that I enjoyed.
The Topkipi Palace was one of the major residences of the Ottoman sultans for almost 400 years and still has treasures on display. Much more interesting to me was the underground Palace Cistern. In the middle of a sweltering hot summer day in Istanbul, it was cool and peaceful among the beautiful arches surrounded by water underground in the Cistern.
I studied Hagia Sophia, a building that had been alternately a Christian church, a Muslim Mosque, and now a museum so I knew what to expect. I had never heard of the Blue Mosque before this trip and we arrived on the first day of Ramadan. It is both a historical tourist site and a functioning mosque so it was full of people, some praying and some studying architecture. I am very glad I went. Later in the day, my group learned about the techniques and iconography of carpet weaving in a workshop.
This is an excavation of an ancient Greek and Roman city that contains the largest collections of Roman ruins in the eastern Mediterranean. We walked through the open ruins with my oldest taking close up photos of every piece of Roman writing he found. Then we entered the covered Terrace Houses, an ongoing archaeological restoration site where the Austrian Archaeological Institute was working restoring these buildings. It was interesting to see the techniques involved in trying to restore both architecture and decoration at multiple places at once. They had to use jigsaw puzzle like skills to put floor and wall mosaics back together.
The Parthenon stands with other ancient Greek structures at the top of the Acropolis in Athens. When we started climbing in the early morning it was already hot. You can see the damage they are trying to repair as you circle the Parthenon. My favourite section was the Porch of the Maidens, with their carved human-looking supports columns. From the top of the Acropolis wall, you have a magnificent view of Athens but it is a very long, long way down.
With the exception of the marble statues from the Parthenon that Lord Elgin loaded up and moved to London, almost every single ancient Greek artwork I every studied was here in this one place. Everywhere I looked, I recognized something and there were so many more as well. My personal favourite was actually a marble statue that was beautifully preserved on one side and pitted and scared when you moved around it. I don't know if it had been on the floor of the sea or damaged by fire, but it was a very eerie thing to see.
Most of my photos of these earlier trips were lost in a hard drive crash (sigh), but a few that I had printed are scanned in here.
The tour guide said that locals still take shelter here in earthquakes, since the supporting structure is so thick. Rome is so full of beautiful and wonderful things to see. What you can't tell from pictures is that some major sites are so close together that you can see one from the other when you turn around. I would really like to go back and spend more time here.
There was a time when the Roman Catholic Church were patrons of the arts to such a degree that some of the most famous pieces of European painting and sculpture are housed here in this small place that is a country of it's own inside the city of Rome. My most vivid memory is of holding the shirts of both my children (so they would not get pulled away in the sea of shoulder to shoulder people) as we shuffled through the Sistine Chapel looking up the entire way at Michelangelo's brilliant painting, newly cleaned to show the vibrant colours after centuries of sooty build up.
I understand why the locals did not know they were sitting near a volcano. It looks like a peaceful green hill. This area is only partially dug out and reconstructed. However, it is so big that several tours can travel at the same time and not cross paths. We watched a cameo carving artist at the end of the tour.
My highlight was seeing multiple paintings by Botticelli, and other works by Lipi, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Yes, Florence does have work by all the Ninja Turtle's namesakes since work by Donatello is here too.
A unique church with that famous Renaissance dome. The baptistery was the birthplace of one point perspective instruction.
The statue of David is the thing I most remember from this location.
Venice is known for glass making so we boarded a water taxi and traveled to the Murano Fine Art Glass Gallery. The factory showed us how they made their work and then we looked in the Gallery. Ever tried to tour a building full of glass with one adult and two young kids. Each piece was worth over $1000 so even though it was stunning, I spent a lot of time stressing about keeping little hands where they should be. Later I came back for night photography in the Piazza San Marco and the Grand Canal that you can see below. Sorry about the grain. This was scanned from a printout after the original file was no longer available.
We were only in Barcelona for a few hours but the only place I visited, the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família designed by Antoni Gaudí, is by far the most unique religious building I have ever visited. It seems a cross between fantasy and reality if you look at the exterior. It almost looks as if a Gothic cathedral was re-imagined by an elf, it is so unusual looking. The interior is filled with coloured light from the many stained glass panels in the tall windows. This church as been under construction for almost 100 years from the plan of one brilliant mind.