Staedel Museum and some photos

Museums are great and Frankfurt is full of them. You can get a yearly pass for 70 euro and you can use that to go to any of the museums (there are 30 of them) for free any time you want. You can also skip queues and get invited to special openings.

Today we visited the Stadel Museum to see a photography exhibition (go to this museum if you can, the photo exhibition was OK but the contemporary painting/sculpture/collage exhibition is mind blowing). It was trying to show the influence of painting on photography (instead of the usual other way round) but only succeeded in this with about 10 of the 60 works there. Also the English description of each photo was entirely inaccurate and confusing. If you go I would recommend not reading any of the descriptions and make your own mind up.

There were a couple of images which were interestingly exploring the relationship of post processing on photography to make it genuine art which led me to think again about the often critiqued validity of using digital manipulation to make art. To take complex photos, explorations in paint and combine them in a kind of montage is entirely valid in my opinion, especially if each of the raw materials has been created by the artist. I hope to explore this in the future with my works.

Seeing as I have visited a photographic exhibition I thought I'd post up some of my camera phone pics. This collection is from my travels around Frankfurt and Emilia Romagna.

I started drawing again. Here's a sketch. I have to finish the lemon. I hope to do more studies until I can paint again. Also look out for some pencil sketches in the future. I want to get back into traditional again soon.

Life - A Never Ending Holiday

This holiday just keeps going! I´ve finished with Cambridge at last and moved on to the freedom of Europe proper. No more of this island mentality. I want the continent! So here I am. It´s all very strange though as I can´t really come to grips with the fact that I am starting work again tomorrow after 6 weeks break.

Even the new apartment is like a hotel room and the local super market is filled with mysteries that only linguistic ignorance can provide. I´m sitting in an internet cafe that smells of tobacco and the incessant sound of overlapping slot machines numbs out the distant sound of thunder and rain.

Tomorrow morning I will join an old friend as we navigate the U Bahn and I take my place in what many in my career would consider the dream company. It´s all like some crazy story, not like real life. I think that part of me has become used to living life as a holiday and for the first time I think that it might actually stick around. For if life isn´t treated as a holiday but as a chore then why live?

Things have gone spiritual in this post and in my heart and in my head. I´ve learnt to accept the fact that I believe in crazy non plausible nonsense and I love it. Embracing your own absurdness is rewarding and gives unshakable confidence. I highly recommend asking yourselves what you believe in. Stop playing the oh so clever atheist game and listen to yourself for just a sec. See if something that you are convinced can´t be true is actually something you still believe. If not then go back to being clever and all knowing. :)

Long live the life! Long live thinking! Long live talking nonsense! Long live believing (or not)! Long live the holiday!