Spent most of today at the British Library, sorting through endless journal references in search of a straight-forward description of spot tests for paint media. By getting there at ten, I managed to get a desk in my favourite reading room, which was completely full by noon. Where do all these students come from? I treated myself to one of the ( Read more... )

I'm frivolling away like mad in my last three unemployed days. Today I had lunch with the Brother (and niece, unexpectedly) in the nice Turkish restaurant near the British Museum, then we went into the museum. Plan A had been to see the Hadrian exhibition, but the museum was very busy indeed and the queue noisy and enormous, so we opted for a ( Read more... )

Woke up late this morning for the second day running, feeling the impact of two consecutive days at exhibitions. I haven't been about here much, because I''ve been frantically trying to catch up on the work I missed when my connection was down. I had got into the habit of pottering about a museum or somewhere with one of my ex-classmates who was ( Read more... )

Saturday was spent tidying up, and cooking. In the evening, the g-d and boyfriend came round for festive sausages (pork and chestnut) and the first of what will probably be many, many Christmas puddings. Later, they put up my tree and decorations, while I sat back with a glass of buck's fizz and supervised. They stayed over, so we had a ( Read more... )

The Millais exhibition was excellent, but we found a lot of his highly detailed, pin-sharp early paintings a little overwhelming. A room full of paintings each of which you can spend hours looking at can be very tiring. There was what I found to be a less interesting section towards the end, of society portraits and fancy pictures of curly-headed ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I finally got out of the house properly and wandered around town in the sunshine. I met a couple of my former classmates at the Royal Academy, and we all went to see the Peter Callesen exhibition, I think I've linked to his website before, but in case I didn't, he makes lovely, fragile cut-paper sculptures. There is a small selection ( Read more... )