Travel Inspiration

While I travel, my best friend tends to be my camera. This trip, I had to buy a new memory card, I took so many photos (by the way, souvenir shops on the way to Musee d'Orsay- ripoff on memory cards)! I figured I'd start with Germany, since we only spent one or two days in London, and I want to keep my museum visits in separate posts.




These three images are of the mustard fields in Germany. The first is from along the road from Hamburg to Rostock, and the other two are from Rostock to Rerik and Rostock to Berlin. Having traveled by train in the US, and driven, etc, and growing up in the suburbs, such vast amounts of farmland are astonishing. Not only farmland, but primarily mustard crops. I'd never seen mustard in anything other than a jar before, and the color, even on cloudy days, took my breath away. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there were often trails or green or brownish fields bordering the mustard, leading me to the idea of a bright yellow egg with green or brownish trails.

Berlin and travel to Paris

We ended up not going to any museums in Berlin yesterday. Instead, we took a double-decker bus around the city and I snapped many photos of architecture. I'll probably need to get a new memory card soon for my camera, too. We then took a sleeper train to Paris: Worst. Train. Ever. The compartment was barely wide enough to stand sideways next to the beds, which were triple-story bunks. @_@ But I survived, and I'm in Paris, and have glimpsed the Eiffel Tower for the first time. :) We also had a busker on an accordion or something on the subway; that was very cool.

I think the current plan is something like: wander around tonight, see Versailles tomorrow, possibly cycle along the Seine and visit the Louvre or Musée d'Orsay on Sunday, and whichever museum we didn't see the other day. And, naturally, there's lots of other stuff planned, but those are the most relevant to this blog.

I probably won't post too often here; this keyboard arrangement is driving me crazy. But I have my sketchbook, some pencils, a Cotman travel kit, and Paris to run around in. :D

One short actual post

There are apparently a /lot/ of mustard fields in Mecklenberg-Vorpommern (sp). I don't know if any of you have ever seen one, but they are amazing things. We drove from Hamburg to Rostock, and from there to Rerik, on the Baltic coast, in search of family roots, and saw tons of them! Great swaths of vivid yellow stretching to the horizon over rolling hills. (And I do mean /vivid/. I took pictures on cloudy days and it's only slightly less saturated than lemon-yellow-ish.) Often, the fields would be near groupings of trees or unused fields, spacing them with green. They also tended to have designs running through them where farm equipment drove through them.

There is actually a point here: often, pysanky artists would employ intricate paths to trap evil and keep it away from the person the egg was gifted to (I'll find that source soon; Mom's comp doesn't have my bookmarks, alas). SO, my thought is to use the path idea to create a more abstract (possibly non-objective?) design. The color palette would be: mustard yellow, with linear designs in dark green, and a greyish purple (observed in a tilled field).

Not an actual post D:

Just to point out that I am active. I've been taking photographs galore and sketching to keep my muse active, but I can't upload anything until I get home (forgetting cords is not fun). Anyway; updates!

Museum tally:
Victoria and Albert (London): check

While I was at the V&A, I came across something very cool: micromosaics. As the name implies, they're mosaics made with teeny-tiny pieces. They looked almost like the brushstrokes of paintings! I'll do an actual post about them later, with photos and artists, but their intricacy and the persistance required to complete them was astounding. One artist is rumored to have spent ~20 /years/ on /one/ micromosaic! Obviously I hope it won't take me 20 years to complete this project, but I hope I can put as much of myself into my work as those artists did.

Planned museums:
Something in Berlin
Louvre
Musee d'Orsay
Versailles
Tate British or Tate Modern

That's all for now! G'night all!