Paris to London Day 1 & 2

London Day 1

Got up bright and early in Paris to head out to Gare Du Nord train station to catch our 10:12 EuroStar train to London. Just had to take a picture of the tiniest elevator in our hotel. The Luggage had to ride by itself.

The train station was packed and going on the EuroStar is like taking an international flight so it was a good think mom insisted we get there early. It takes about 20 minutes from the start of the line to when you arrive at the gate. You go through French customs then walk a few feet, fill out a landing form and then go through British customs and then your luggage gets x-rayed then you finally get approved to go to your train which was awaiting us as soon as we got finished with check in.

The ride was very easy and relaxing and had some beautiful sights of the French and British countryside and the tunnel portion moves very fast it seemed like 5 minutes although I’m sure it was much longer.

We arrived at St. Pancras International train station by 11:30 or so (there is an hour time difference) so the whole ride took a little under two and half hours.  It’s a very comfortable way to travel but expensive almost $300.00 each. But when you take into consideration they built a very expensive tunnel to make this happen and someone has to pay for it, I guess it makes sense. Not to mention all those customs officers who do nothing but EuroStar. There is also a Megabus that goes much less expensive if we had only known we would have done that but it is, of course much, much longer.

The St. Pancras Station is simply gorgeous it looks like an old castle or place with beautiful red bricks and towers. It’s also a luxury hotel that we cut through to go into the train station.

We checked into our hotel wish was about two very short blocks from the station, Kings Cross Inn Hotel and we were so lucky to have picked it. They recently renovated the hotel and its’ really very nice, not fancy but new furnishings and really nice staff and the owner who greet us when we arrived was so friendly and helpful and assigned us his best room which was adorable. He’s from Egypt and really knows good customer service and is so friendly.

We went back to the train station to get hop-on-hop-off tickets and find out about trains to the airport as we still had to book mom’s trip back to Galway. The attendant was so nice and said it might be a good choice to try Euston Train Station down the road a bit because they have a train that goes to Holyhead, Wales and the ferry terminal there and a ferry that takes you right to Dublin. So we headed over and amazingly it was only 43.00 British pounds which is about $60.00 us to go on one train directly from London to Holyhead and then on the ferry directly to Dublin where she got the bus right to Galway which was so easy and the station was a 5 minute walk from our hotel. It was perfect and I just got an email that mom arrived in Galway safely and had a great trip, she loved the boat!

 

We did our sightseeing thing on the tour bus and saw among things the Tower Bridge, London Eye, Big Ben and we even took the River Thames tour boat to Greenwich and walked wen to the Navel museum there and enjoyed a really lovely lunch in the pub including a phenomenal scone with clotted cream and homemade jam, yum!!! It’s so funny, I never eat scones in New York but when I get to Britain or Ireland it’s one of the first things I want to do.

We saw the Cutty Stark ship that is now on display as a museum at the Greenwich pier. It is famous for sailing from Australia to England in only 72 days. A bit of history on her “On the afternoon of Monday 22 November 1869, a beautiful little clipper ship of 963 tons gross was launched at Dumbarton on the River Leven. On that day, she was given a name that was to become renowned throughout the seafaring world. Cutty Sark has travelled across the world, sailing under both the Red Ensign and the Portuguese flag, visiting every major port in the world through the course of her working life. In admiration of her beauty and in recognition of her fame, she was preserved for the nation by Captain Wilfred Dowman in 1922. Since then, the old clipper has been berthed in Falmouth and Greenhithe, finally arriving at her current resting place in Greenwich in 1954.”

We then took the boat back and got some pictures of the London Eye and Big Ben at night.  We were back at the hotel around 7:00pm and I went out to the grocery store and picked up dinner. We were both so tired and the weather was so cold here with harsh wind and some rain. So mom read all the materials she’d collected like newspapers and magazines left on the EuroStar and I watched a mystery on TV and ate dinner. It was actually really nice to not be out late.

London Day 2

Up early again and at breakfast at the hotel by 7:30am. Mom wanted to leave by 8:00am to make sure we got to Euston Station early. The train to Holyhead arrived early and she was able to get on and we met a nice women from Ireland who was going to visit her daughter in Manchester and she told us all about the bus that would be outside the Dublin Ferry Terminal and would take her directly to the bus station in town. The women had made this trip several times so she was a good source for information.

I waved mom good bye as the train pulled out and then I went to the Nero Café outside the station to figure out what my next move was. I am starting a housesitting assignment tomorrow, the 28^th in South East England for a month and half so I had to figure out what train to take tomorrow and where to stay tonight. It’s only an hour and half ride and the hotels in Ipswich where you change train were just too expensive so I ended up walking around the area near our hotel from last night and found a nice hostel/hotel that was inexpensive and clean. The room is very, very small, like a large closet but it was good for the one night. So I dropped off my bags and was on the hop-on-hop-off bus tour, green line, by 11:15am and did pretty much all the routes.

I eventually got off on Regent Street and walked around the shopping area and went to Covent Garden Market where they have the big Christmas tree up already just not decorated and also large Christmas ball decorations hanging from the ceiling. There is Christmas stuff out all around the city and I imagine it’s the same in New York as well. And they have a large China Town now which I didn't see on my first visit almost 20 years ago.

I walked down to the river and saw the Cleopatra’s Needle which is a large obelisk that was given as a gift to England from Egypt for helping them during some war. The obelisk has a twin and it is located in New York City in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum. It was also given I understand as a gift for some help we showed to Egypt at some point in time. The obelisks are over 3,000 years old and the ones here in London came with two enormous Sphinx statues that were supposed to be placed in a way to show them guarding the Needle but were installed incorrectly and are actually facing the Needle. You can see them in this picture.

I made my way to the Millennium Bridge which is a pedestrian walkway built for the Millennium and when it opened and the locals began to walk across it the bridge began to sway dramatically and the bridge was instantly closed. When the architect was asked why he had designed it that way he said “It wasn’t the bridge it was the way Londoners walked.”  Needless to say the spent another Million Pounds or so fixing the problem and it reopened and is a wonderful way to see the city from up high. It’s a very quick walk, maybe 5 minutes and it leads directly to the Tate museum of modern art.  I had never been so it was very exciting to visit it today and it’s totally free to go in.  I guess they really want to encourage people to go and it’s a large old power plant or something like that refurbished to be a really amazing art space.  Here are some of my favorites from today’s visit and I was especially excited to Mark Rothco’s because I had seen the play “Red” about his life and about this series of paintings he was commissioned to do for the Four Season’s Restaurant in NYC. I had no idea they resided in this museum so it was so exciting to see them up close and personal.

“Head of a Catalan Peasant” is one of Joan Miró's most important works of the mid-1920s. It fuses the explicitly Catalan imagery, which had characterised much of his work between 1923-4, with the 'automatic' style he had developed in Paris, under the influence of the Surrealist group.  Miró began the work by painting his canvas with a white ground. He then applied a very thin, almost translucent wash of blue oil paint mixed with turpentine. This created an airy space which contrasts with the graphic quality of the semi-figurative imagery. The composition was long believed to have been drawn in a dreamlike state, as if spontaneously from Miró's unconscious.

“Bust of a Woman 1944” - This portrait of the photographer Dora Maar was painted on May 5, 1944. Her reconfigured features may reflect the complex atmosphere of the final weeks of the Nazi Occupation of Paris.  Deprivation and tension remained high in the city.  In February two of Picasso's closest Jewish friends - the poets Robert Desnos and Max Jacob - had been deported.  Yet there were also signs of defiance and hope: in March, Maar took part alongside Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in a clandestine performance of Picasso's play Desire Caught by the Tail, directed by Albert Camus.

“Nude, Green leaves and Bust” (also known as Nude with Sculptor's Turntable; Nu au plateau de sculpteur) 1932 – Pablo Picasso first encountered Marie-Thérèse Walter in January 1927. He kept their relationship secret for many years, even from some of his closest friends, but particularly from his wife Olga. In 1931-2 he embarked on a series of sculptures and paintings of Marie-Thérèse, made at his studio in the Chateau de Boisgeloup, which he had purchased in 1930. Picasso’s habit of dating his work very precisely makes it possible to trace the development of this sequence as Picasso discovered an increasingly complex manipulation of her body. Made on 8 March 1932, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust is the most intense among the group of large nudes, counterpointing the real head with a sculpted head, and the folds of Marie-Thérèse’s body with the luxuriant forms of a philodendron plant. The setting includes a secretive curtain against which the sculptural bust casts a double shadow, as if the white of the foreground nude was literally illuminating the space.

 

Alberto Giacometti’s “Composition (Man and Woman) - This small but complex structure is based loosely on the human figure. It was made in a period when Giacometti looked at late Cubist works and so-called primitive art, exploring different ways of representing the figure. Here the male and female figures are `transparent constructions' (to use Giacometti's phrase), composed of simplified rhyming shapes. Comparison with related pieces by the artist suggests that at least one of the hemispheres may be read as a head, while the zig-zag lines were intended to signify the female form. If you read my Venice entries you’ll recognize his work from some I featured there.

Arshile Gorky’s “Waterfall” - Gorky was born in Armenia, but was forced to flee Turkish persecution, and in 1920 settled in the USA. His early work was strongly influenced by Pablo Picasso and the European Surrealists. In the summer of 1942, Gorky spent three weeks in Connecticut making drawings from nature. He went on to produce a series of paintings that refer to natural forms. In this painting, amorphous shapes and drips of liquid paint suggest the fluidity of the waterfall.

Karel Appel’s “Hip, Hip, Hoorah!” - The title of Hip, Hip, Hoorah! was intended to celebrate the artistic freedom from tradition achieved by the CoBrA group. The figures are hybrid creatures, combining human attributes with animal or bird-like features. Appel thought of them as ‘people of the night’, and so gave them a dark background. The bright colours and child-like imagery are typical of CoBrA. Appel often took inspiration from children's drawings, believing that ‘the child in man is all that's strongest, most receptive, most open and unpredictable’.

Mark Rothko’s series for the Four Season Restaurant – Note (early this month, I think on the 7^th of October a man came into the Tate and defiled one of the Maroon paintings by writing something in black ink on the bottom.) - This painting comes from one of three series of canvases painted by Rothko in 1958-9 in response to a commission for murals for the small dining room of the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York. The Four Seasons, one of the smartest restaurants in the city, is in the Seagram Building, a celebrated classic modern skyscraper on Park Avenue designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. As he worked on the commission Rothko's conception of the scheme became more and more sombre and he abandoned the first series as being too light in mood. He then adopted a palette of black on maroon and dark red on maroon, and compositional structures of open, rectangular, window-like forms, rather than his usual arrangement of uniform rectangular patches, used for the first series. He later said 'After I had been at work for some time I realised that I was much influenced subconsciously by Michelangelo's walls in the staircase room of the Medicean Library in Florence. He achieved just the kind of feeling I'm after ...' The reference is to the motif of heavily pedimented blank stone windows set in the white walls of the ante-room of the Laurentian Library, which together with other architectural effects created there by Michelangelo, create an atmosphere noted for its oppressive, almost frightening, grandeur. In the end Rothko decided to withhold his murals from installation in the Four Seasons, his reported reason being that he did not wish his pictures to be a background to the eating of the privileged. Clearly, in any case, he had created a series of paintings whose particularly solemn and meditative character ill-suited a fashionable restaurant. It was these paintings, seen in Rothko's studio in 1960 by John and Dominique de Menu, that prompted these art lovers to commission Rothko to decorate a chapel that they would build in Houston, Texas. The project, described by Rothko as the most important of his life, was completed just before his death in 1970.

I also included Rothko's "Untitled c1950-2" because of it's lightness and stark contrast to the other works. In his mature work, Rothko abandoned specific reference to nature in order to paint images with universal associations. By the late 1940s he had developed a style in which hazy, luminous rectangles float within a vertical format. Rothko wrote that the great artistic achievements of the past were pictures of the human figure alone in a moment of utter immobility. He sought to create his own version of this solitary meditative experience, scaling his pictures so that the viewer is enveloped in their subtly shifting, atmospheric surface.

 

Henri Matisse “The Snail” - After 1948 Matisse was prevented from painting by ill health but, although confined to bed, he produced a number of works known as gouaches découpées. These were made by cutting or tearing shapes from paper which had been painted with gouache. The shapes were placed and pasted down by an assistant working under Matisse's instruction. Some of the later ones, such as The Snail, were of very large dimensions. The technique, explored in his picture book Jazz (published 1947) and other works, opened up new possibilities for him. Matisse said of the technique that it 'allows me to draw in the colour. It is a simplification for me. Instead of drawing the outline and putting the colour inside it - the one modifying the other - I draw straight into the colour' (quoted in Amis de l'art, October 1951). His secretary Mme Lydia Delectorskaya described the making of The Snail (letter to the Tate Gallery, 30 March 1976): The Snail was made in the Hôtel Régina at Nice. H. Matisse had at his disposal sheets of paper painted in gouache by assistants, in all the colours he used for the 'papiers découpés'. A background of white paper - of the dimensions indicated by H.M. - was put on the wall and the assistant pinned onto it the pieces of gouached paper which H.M. passed to him indicating exactly where they should be placed. When H.M. decided that his composition was finished, it was lightly stuck to the background. The panel was taken down when H.M. needed the wall for a further work. When later on it was sent to Lefebvre-Foinet [in Paris] to be pasted down, before anything was moved, an extremely precise tracing was made to ensure that no changes were made in the composition, not even by so much as a millimetre. Matisse's daughter Mme Duthuit said that her father made many drawings of snails at this time and that the idea for this work came out of these. The concentric pattern formed by the coloured shapes in the centre of the work echoes the spiral pattern found in the snail's shell. Matisse told André Verdet (pp.64-5), 'I first of all drew the snail from nature, holding it. I became aware of an unrolling, I found an image in my mind purified of the shell, then I took the scissors'. He has combined pairs of complementary colours - red/green, orange/blue, yellow/mauve - to create a particularly vibrant effect. He gave the picture the alternative title La Composition Chromatique.

Wasilly Kandinsky “Swinging” - The title of Swinging conveys the painting’s sense of dynamic movement, suggestive of the rhythms of modernity. One of the pioneers of abstract painting, Kandinsky championed a mystical approach to art. His treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in 1911, argued for art that was purified from all references to the material world. He felt that colour in particular was essential for liberating art from naturalistic appearances.

So it was a wonderful afternoon of exploring color, form and theme and all in a remarkably open and utilitarian space like the Tate.

I walked past Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre which is right next door to the Tate on the River and is a wonderful reproduction of the original Globe of Shakespeare’s time which stood down the road, in land a bit about a 5 minute walk from this one. There are no more performances going on but it would be so exciting to see one there in the warmer months. You can recognize the building in the pictures here because it’s white with brown wooden beams along the circular façade.

I hopped on the tour bus again and took it to the nearest stop along the River that took me to Covent Garden’s and then walked around and up to my hotel. The whole walk took about an hour but it was so nice to just explore the city. I realized that is was Saturday night as well and that it would be great to find a Catholic church but it was already 6:30pm. And about 10 minutes later I was walking down this random street near Covent Gardens and looked up to see the sign for the Corpus Christi Catholic Church on Maiden Lane. The mass was nearly over but I still got to participate in the Eucharist and then I stayed for the Novena that was directly after mass. The priest was very friendly and I could hear him talking to every person who left the church asking where they were from and such.

I had dinner at this really nice pub near my hotel called the Skinners Arm and had a deliciously spicy veggie soup and fish fingers sandwich with homemade tartar sauce, yum, yum!!! And was talking with this older gentleman who has lived in the neighborhood over 50 years and used to work as an illustrator years ago before computers and he told me all about his many trips to New York City and around the US.

I was back at my hotel the Belgrove around 9ish and just did some computer work and was off to bed early. We turned back the clocks and hour so that’s exciting for us all to have an extra hour of sleep.