A Polish tapestry

Recently a Polish tapestry came up for sale on an auction site and I bought it as I have been interested in various former Soviet countries' tapestry cultures for a while now and have been gathering a few books on the tapestries of Estonia, Latvia, Poland and Russia. So finding a tapestry from 1975 or so seems to fit very well with my readings of that era.

You may ask what it is in these tapestries I like - I was introduced to tapestry weaving in Denmark as a teenager in the mid-1980s. This was a time when the aesthetic of the fibre arts movement had been disseminated for a while through various publications and books, mostly of a 'how to' nature and I went regularly to the local library to explore the latest in tapestry weaving books. Of course these books did not deal with Eastern bloc tapestry, but the aesthetic was hinted at in the use of natural fibres, natural colours or vegetable died yarn. I don't really remember what the iconography related to - probably themes such as butterflies, abstraction, or evocations of folk tapestry motifs - like in Sweden Danish folk textiles used a type of kelim type of design, and my mother has such a weaving from 1906 or so.

Whatever it was, I was hooked on tapestry and used homespun coarse wool, explored exposing the warp, used dog hair yarn and other experimental elements. And now, decades later, as I slowly re-engage with tapestry weaving, and with experimental art work, I find going to the Eastern European weavers as they were then, now Baltic, Polish, Hungarian and so on, there is much to learn from them. There is just a tiny hint of the innovations from the Polish art weavers of the 1960s who came from art colleges and the unique experimental tapestry culture they experienced there.

This may all sound a bit rambling, but I don't want to pursue a major exposition on the last 50 years of tapestry weaving, just to say that I think the 1960s and -70s fibrearts continue to be a great source of inspiration and freedom of thinking about the medium. Much focus on the tradition of tapestry and a purist frame of mind around the perfect surface and reproducibility can be useful in commercial work, but I prefer the freedom and openness to possibilities that the medium can also provide and which was proven so well by the fibre artists of the mid 20th century.

So here is the main body of the tapestry - there is no maker's mark, no label on the reverse:

When it was shown on the auction site it was very difficult to see the proper colouring, the details and full scale of the piece. It is around 99 x 124 cm large, a good size, and the weft is thick. There is a pale yellow border down the sides and the image is of flowers - not sure what they are meant to be, but you can see that the flowers are made up of small round details that either sit in a plant arrangement or are scattered on what might be the ground. in any case there is good use of colour, nice shadowing techniques and it deserves to be seen as a whole. I took a picture of it outside to show the colours better, but indoors I suspect it will have a warmer feel, those oranges, reds and brown will provide a warmish glow.

 

 

Details of the tapestry

A detail of the back of the tapestry that shows how thick the weft is. The warp is linen and a hem has been woven to enable the top and lower edges to be folded back. It looks as if the tapestry was glued(!) to something for hanging purposes which is not great, and I will be sewing on a strip of fabric to enable it to be hung with a pole.

Perhaps not the greatest work of art but still a decent and robust piece and I do like the flower details a lot. I am hoping that it will continue to spread a little inspiration as I walk past it or sit and mull over what to do next. In a way it would have been nice to know who the maker was, I do not think it was necessarily a hobbyist, but it could have been I suppose. A professional would have left their mark, or perhaps someone took off the label which would have told us more.

Recent holiday to Germany

It has been while since I have written about something of interest. Not because there was nothing to tell, but because time is passing with busy things to do, both at the weekends and after work - vegetable dyeing, acid dyeing, knitting and felting. So for now I will add a few images from a holiday we had to Germany in June. We went to Hamburg and Lübeck. Both cities are great for different reasons: Hamburg is a big vibrant city, with fine museums, a large river, the Elbe, and an interesting history. Lübeck is a smaller city with an ancient city centre on an island in a river, the Trave, with many, many churches and great old buildings. We also spent a period further north and went for walks on the coast.

I should say that I don't take many long view photos of cities as I always feel that they look flat when I get home, and by focussing instead on particular details you can find new interesting things that may be useful for future art work.

Hamburg

We have been to Hamburg before and have done some touristic things like sailing on the Binnen Alster boat that gives you views of the city from the large lake in the city centre, whilst this time we returned to the Kunsthalle and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe. This time we went for a walk to parts we hadn't explored before and found some amazing architecture to explore - Chilehaus and the building that houses chocolate museum (which we did not visit), both lie in the Speichertsadt, which also includes canals and warehouses.

Here's a detail of the Chile Haus - a solid dark bricked building with a jagged sharp-edged facade.
 

 

The building opposite was softer with a curved facade running along the road and sculpture by Lothar Fischer:

 

 

Near the historic office distric which is now a Unesco world heritage site the old warehouse buildings sitting next to the canals still look grand. I am guessing that many facades somehow stayed standing even after the bombing of WWII as the walls and brickwork looked old and not at all 'renovated' and some looked quite run down, although other are clearly now being used as trendy techie offices.

There were quiet moments for coffee and looking out into court yards with beautiful trees 

 

And on the way to the Kunsthalle we came across a grand building that must have been an important building as a kind of providential society or other:

 

We also came across a place that looked like a closed bar - it had a large folded paper polar bear in the window which was quite a fantastic thing:

The Kunsthalle was showing a temporary exhibition of Manet's work, which was good, with many small works and interesting connections made to for examle Berthe Morisot, and then we went around finding things that might inspire - this time I concentrated on the modern collections and was happy to find work by Gerhard Richter, Robert Morris - a very impressive piece of felt folding down by force of its own weight - and a white painting by Robert Ryman. Then on to the historical collections to see the German impressionists including Lovis Conrinth, and a room dedicated to Caspar David Friedrich, whose work I never tire of looking at. They also have fine modern art including a fish by Paul Klee I like and next to a Giacometti sculpture they had a painting by him to again make connections I guess of influences and how stylistic characteristics echo across media and disciplines.

We took a boat trip this time as well - but on the Elbe - along a couple of canals and then out onto the river proper to see the port. A huge place, with ship building, repairing and all manner of freight and blossoming culture. I did not take too many long views, but looked at the side of the canals and the concrete walls running along the river in places, some conceret decaying:

 Here's more decaying paint and iron:

Paint work on boats can be very painterly.... but it also so very available and visible, it is almost ubiquitous in harbours and in old yards of different types.

There were many cranes and large metal structures to study on the river:

Along the coast to the North

There was also a trip to the more Northern parts and I walked nostalgically on the beach, enjoying the sunshine of summer and listening to the sea and the wind in the trees. These environments were some of my favourite places in the past, and it is great to go back and enjoy them again:

And the seaside always have wonderful things to look at and touch and pick up -

A dried up section of orange:

 

On a ferry we took, some thick rope - which is a great source for thinking about thick textile objects:

Sea cabage:

And lovely seaweed floating in the water:

We took a short trip to the Nolde Stiftung again, it is a great place and every year they put out a new set of paintings and water colours, so it is worth a re-visit. Nolde's work really is some of the best water color work I have seen. I am always amazed as the way he used his colours.

And there was also a day trip to Schloss Gottorf on the outskirts of Schleswig: a large castle on an island with great collections acorss the full spectrum of human culture - achaeological collections, including the Nydam Boat, historical collections, decorative arts (a set of Jugendstil gallery and a brilliant modern art collection, with expressionist work based on a collection, Sammlung Rolf Horn. There was so much to see you couldn't possibly see it all, so I concentrated on the most important things that I thought might inspire my own work.

On the way to Schleswig we stopped by the Dannevirke wall, which is a Viking-medievan earth work which was built to protect the Norther lands from certain tribes:

There was a small informative museum narrating the history of the building and the archaeology of the site. Some sections were also used by the Danish army during the war with Prussia in the 19th century - a real gem. If we had had more time there could have been a good walk along the wall, but we were headed to Schloss Gottorf, and that was itself a gem of a place.

Lübeck

Lübeck is an old Hansestadt. It is famous for its old Holsten Gate, which appears on postcards - of course without the busy roads that run on each side of its gardens, so here's a reality check:

 

The city is very beautiful, there are many old buildings and many churches to visit. Again we had been to Lübeck before, but that was to go to the Christmas market several years ago, and new museums have opened since then, and and there was plenty to do in the summer sun.

So we visited churches - these grand old places of spirituality and power. A lot of effort went into church architecture and so there is always some interesting architecture and art to study in tese places.

Here's a small example of the fine puppets in a museum devoted to puppetry:

This museum has both Western and Eastern puppets, a lovely Indian puppet elephant, and when we went they had an exhibition on Pinocchio with a puppet from a Soviet film from  the interwar period, and sections of the film on a loop showing the 'making' of Pinocchio. I love puppets and it was good to see a few films of stop-motion animation and so on, as puppets hanging on their strings look a bit sad. They are so much better animated and telling a story.
 
There was a church near the Puppet Museum which had been whitewashed and in its simplicity looked very grand:

We also visited the St Marienkirche, which is where JS Bach went to learn organ music with the local organist. This church is very grand with large areas of reproduction medieval murals. It is also a very beautiful place. In one corner the churchbells which fell during the bombings of WWII have been left with a candle as a reminder of peace and reconciliation:

In one church there was an ancient set of benches with carved wooden arm rests of head of monks - they had worn away with time and looked soft and shiny in the light:

Oh, and then there is the occasional piece of functional street furniture that is worth a mention, like this great door handle-cum-door lock:

As usual I took many photographs and will probably use some of them in the future, but just to end this short story of my visit I will add one on a rococo ceiling detail from a museum:

 

And a single example of a quick draing I did one evening in the hotel:

 

Japanese 'tapestry'

This post will be a very brief foray into a weaving technique called tsuzure which they use in Japan. It is a kind of tapestry technique, although some items I have that is made in this way seem to have long floating wefts on the reverse, rather than the discontinuous weft sections seen in a western tapestry. That is not to say they do not weave like that as well, my first piece of tsuzure woven fabric was made in this way.

Here's an example of an obi woven in this way

 

And another in an abstract floral design

 

 

So, the pieces I have that are made in tsuzure technique are all obis. An obi is the belt Japanese women tie around their waists over the kimono. The weave makes the obi a quite solid fabric, and as you can see the woven image is typically woven in one end of the obi across the part that will be visible after being folded appropriately. At the further end there are perhaps two smaller facing woven images, across the part that is folded in half.

There are excellent videos on Youtube that shows how obi are mounted and folded in dressing in a traditional Japanese way. I have selected one on how to tie a Nagoya obi, which you can watch here. And here's another showing how to tie a fukuro obi.

The obi is in a very fine silk weave, and the long sections of the obi that do not have a tapestry section are plain woven. The obi shows signs of having been used, as there are folds from where it has been tied and folded across the wearer. The pattern section of the obi can be of many different motifs - traditional, abstract, floral, figurative, in fact any symbol or design that might have inspired the weaver. Youtube also has a very good short film of a weaver demonstrating tsuzure weaving, which shows an elderly man at a horizontal loom, that looks a bit like a cloth weaving loom, and he uses small bobbins containing a very fine silk yarn.

The Japanese weaving industry has suffered a decline in the later twentieth century, and in order to retain some of the skills there is an educational area within the traditional textile manufacturing area Nishijn in Kyoto that can be visited to see how weavers and fabric designers work. I haven't personally visited this place, although I would like to, there is something a bit sad about a once-glorious textile art now being mainly visible as a tourist spectacle. The industry has traditionally been organised around small family weaver makers working on obi and other precious textiles that are supplied to centralised manufacturers (Hareven, 2003). Hareven's book is an anthropological study of the weavers of traditional Japanese textiles rather than a book on the textiles themselves. It is a vehicle for the voices of the small weaver families to give them the space to talk about their work and describe how their lives have been shaped by their trade and skill.

I am always in awe at how wonderfully simple, but always so exactly right, Japanese packaging is. The people who sent me the obi use a postal bag made of brown paper, in which the obi is either rolled or folded into a neatly folded piece of bubble wrap.

And this time there was an additional piece of packaging which consisted of large sheets of white paper, a couple of sheet were folded into a bag which was in turn placed into another folded container. The sections were stuck together with smaller triangular pieces. Here are some pictures which I hope show this construction:

Not sure this shows how the sections were attached, but this is where the pieces join:

Tex 1 Assignment 4 - Research point – the textile artist

This exercise asks for a consideration of the textile artist in comparison to designers and craftspeople; it then goes on to look at a couple of textile artists whose work we admire or find inspiring.

In the previous research points we were asked to look at the designer-maker, the crafts person and textile design originating at the hands of designers for commercial textiles. Where textiles are part of a crafts process the maker is integral to the process, working with a high degree of skill when struggling with their chosen materials. There is a strong focus on process and the materiality of the textile – and I would suggest that the line between craft and art is a fine one and probably quite fluid, as it is a matter of emphasis – whether on the making process or on the final outcome.

Both these stand in contrast to a designer who is hired by a commercial organisation to develop textile ‘products’. This designer may give their name to an item, or they are anonymous, as the central brand identity is determined by the organisation they work for. The central aim is commercial production for a consumer market, and so production is potentially of a large volume of stuff, whilst for artists and craft people the object is unique or made in small batches, while the object is displayed in a gallery or high end shop as a rarefied object for a discerning buyer. The object made within the crafts and/or arts world is part of a positional economy of connoisseurs, galleries, museums, art critics and auction houses, which the mass produced consumer item only becomes part of this once it has gained an ‘aura’ from age or from retrospectively applied ‘names’ of makers.

It is probably not always that clear cut – artists such as Sheila Hicks started out as an artist (paintings), but was also a designer-developer of fabrics for companies such as Knoll (Simon (2011)). Her work was bought by corporate customers for their interiors, and her installation work inspired interior designers to create ‘environments’ for displaying goods. She has a great sense of material and colour, and technique is central to the expression. Does that then make her a crafts person or is her work art?

I am aware that the fibre art movement of the 1960s that Sheila Hicks was part of is seeing a bit of a revival with a retrospective of Hicks' work in 2011, major exhibitions of fibre sculpture and tapestry in the US and France (Porter et al (2014), Bellu et al (2013)). The artists who worked in this area were in many cases fine artists who had trained at art college. Some of them, for example Hicks, Magdalena Abakanowitz, Kay Sekimachi and Lenore Tawney subsequently learned weaving in workshops of cloth or tapestry weavers, and then, when key books on ancient techniques where published, they explored new ways of looking at ancient textile techniques using material experimentally and to a scale that I am sure would not have been explored much before.
 
The definition of an artist as someone concerned with concepts and 'grand ideas' is probably not completely accurate. Crafts people moving into the arts arena work with ideas, but using their technical skill and expertise to express this, whilst artists may have started in one area and then moved into another, such as textiles, but then they over time gain the skill and understanding needed for their chosen area. And some go as far as giving their work conceptual titles, which I sometimes read with some scepticism. Why suggest all manner of poetic allusions if what we are seeing is a beautiful piece of weaving? It is perfectly valid, I believe, to produce the textile in its own right and display it as a textile object, without having to legitimise it within the institutional discourses of art critics, galleries and art history and theory that carry such weight. The existence of the object does not necessarily become more meaningful by being placed within a language of theoretical constructs, but then there has for some time been a phenomenological strand in art theory that seems to place these objects within an 'otherworldly' experiential space.
 
Anyway, back to the two artists I will discuss here - I have chosen to look at the work of a modernist artist, Cornelia Forster (1906-1990), a relatively unexamined painter, print maker and tapestry artist who learned her weaving in the French tradition, and Sheila Hicks (b.1934), who comes out of the US based fine art sphere. Both use colour as an expressive medium, both use textile media, but one was not a widely know artist, and the other has had a long and continuing art career with a prominent profile in the art and textile world. 

Cornelia Forster worked in various media, some of her work being quite interesting, some pieces looks a bit derivative to me, but it is interesting for its roots in French-Swiss Modernism, and she worked in various styles and techniques, including surrealism, abstraction, painting, drawing and sculptural abstraction. What I find interesting in her tapestries is that firstly, from an art historical perspective she worked early on in the style of French work, close to the work of Jean Lurcat, who played a key role in the revival of the French tapestry industry during the mid 20th century. Her work follows the tradition of wall-hung works, woven tapestries in the Aubusson technique. What dominates the web-site collection of her work linked here, are tapestries in colour harmonies following pallets of soft pastels for example in her flower compositions, but she also had abstract pieces woven into tapestries. Colour in the decorative flower tapestries is used very sensitively. The works look decorative and do not challenge any perceived notions of this medium, which may have something to do with her commissions, but they are woven to a high degree of skill and there is a keen sense of the tradition of the tapestry medium, with a strong  mid-20th century aesthetic. Most of her tapestries have designs that cover the whole surface of the work, there is a lot of detail in some, and the designs are mainly vertical, whether the works are landscape or portrait. What I like about these works is their fairy tale quality. There is something narrative about some of them, figures appear in dense flowery jungles, or the spectator can dream themselves into fantasy jungles of vegetation.

I have to admit now, that there are very many good narrative tapestry artists to choose from, and that I chose Cornelia Forster because she is not well known and I think she should be more widely recognised, and secondly because I find her narrative representation interesting and suggestive, but know that this is not my own style. Hence I find the aesthetic attractive because it gives me something that I couldn't create myself. I see aesthetic affinities in Michael Hearld's illustrations and Klaus Haapaniemi's designs, and this is something that reading fairy tales evoke, the otherworldly, the mystical, the beautiful and sometimes the gruesome.

Now why would I then choose Sheila Hicks as my second choice, when her work is fully abstracted? Well, I got very excited about the fibre art movement when I first bought the book by Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen, Beyond Craft: Art Fabric (1973). In it were photographs of these huge works in different techniques by a collection of textile artists, quite disparate, from different countries, but the ones that stood out where Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz. I had taught myself tapestry weaving 20 years before and here were works that I felt intuitively had informed the books I had been reading at that time.

Hicks' work was inspired by ancient pre-Columbian textile techniques. She improvised weavings on a small portable tapestry frame and had worked for industry as well as becoming an important exhibiting artist. Many of her works use wrapping techniques. She works on a large scale as well as her small miniature tapestries, but there was a sense of freshness to her work that may have looked at ancient techniques, but spoke with a contemporary language. Her sense of colour is interesting, sometimes she works with harmony, at other times with contrasts. Her work includes long strands of linen wrapped with smooth, lustrous silks, and more recently her work includes chunky wrapped cushiony bundles of fabric. She has also worked with embroidery and has used elastic bands, paper, shells and other unusual materials in her work.

Hicks has had a long career, and in 2011 she had a retrospective in the US. She works from a studio in Paris, and has several assistants to help. Not surprising really, she is not young but has been working since the 1950s, and she continues to exhibit. I read somewhere that she works very hard and her large body of work is there to show for it. I find her range tremendous, and from time to time look for examples of her miniatures on the web, and they seem to be exploratory inventions using fibre mainly in all manner of colours. So, although she often uses wrapping this technique provides openings for various ways of showing off the fibre. I am not always convinced by some of the names given to the pieces, I think they are strong in themselves, they are constructed structures, independent and complete things made of fine yarns. I also find other artists' work .from the same period (1960s) fascinating. The works in sisal and rope by Jagoda Buic, Abakanowicz and Aurelia Munos were to a scale and in forms that show real vision and substance of thought in making. They are about process and material and express something beyond themselves. I think these artists really understood fibre and what it could do and wanted to make significant statements about that. There is also much fine work coming from Japan, but due to space here I will just end by linking to fine pieces of string work that Toshiko Horiuchi Macadam made for children's playgrounds.

References

Bellu, Sylvie et al, Decorum, Paris: Flammarion, 2013

Constantine, Mildred and Larsen, Jack Lenor, Beyond Craft: Art Fabric, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1973

Porter, Jenelle and Adamson, Glenn, Fiber: Sculpture 1960-Present, Prestel, 2014

Simon, Joan et al, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, Yale University Press, 2010

Project 7 - The Theme Book

Project 7 is a first step into the final project in assignment 5, where a self-planned and conceived textile piece is asked for.

I have been looking at the idea and the reality of trees for some time and think that is going to be one of my ongoing and long-lasting threads for thinking about my work. My tutor suggested I do a mindmap on the theme I might work on - or maybe it was on design ideas? - so I started with a mindmap of the TREE:

The mindmap includes what I could think of in a couple of sittings and I have not included all the detail that could be thought about under the different headings. There is a long and wide-ranging cultural history of using the tree in all manner of ways - as symbol (e.g. tree of life), as a material, wood, for making things, as creating particular environments to name a few. Fundamentally trees are about life and fertility, about longevity and sometimes something spiritual and transcendent. In the part of the world where seasons are pronounced we see the changing times of the year in the trees, and here a barren tree can evoke melancholy and loss. Trees are also affected by the changes that are now taking place through changes in the climate, in rising temperatures, droughts; and where man is so follows all manner of devastation - deforestation and erosion - but also possibilities of positive ecology where land is left to recover from cultural interventions. 

A design book

From a design perspective I am now making a work book for some design themes that I may use for this project and assignment 5, project 10. There was a bundle of papers in my local charity shop which I thought could be used as a book - they are fairly large and the paper shiny, but with a good weight to it, so there are probably benefits and some limitations to how the book will work as a sketchbook. It does give me the opportunity to make a book cover which I haven't done before (the cover will not be the final project, just another sample on the way there).

Literary sources of trees

As part of this work I have been downloading pictures of trees doing amazing things like encapsulating other things, being almost suspended by their roots, being enormous as some trees are, and of course various art works by historical and contemporary artists. I have a very useful book, The Magic of Trees, Bruderlin (1999), which is a compilation of artists' rendering of trees, from an otherworldly Theosophist tree by Mondrian, to trees by impressionists and others as well as masks and totem poles from non-Western cultures.

The book Bäume, Hesse (1984), with excerpts of texts and poems by Hermann Hesse has also been inspirational. His short piece on the chestnut tree is very beautiful and there are other words of his and others on the value of trees to nourish and give meaning to life that can be found on the web (sorry to those of you interested in this - I don't think these Hesse texts have been translated into English - oh yes, I have found a site where some of these words have been translated: Hesse on the Tree).

From my own background I am digging out fairytales (H C Andersen's The Tinder Box, about magical things happening through a soldier entering a dead tree, The Fir-tree), songs and anything else I can remember. A very fond and warm memory I have of trees are of some very large trees standing immediately opposite our house. To a small person they were very tall indeed, and in the late summer and autumn winds the rustle of leaves filled the atmosphere. We used to climb the lower trees, or use the branches for bouncing and sew-sawing on.

References

Bruderlin, Markus, 1999, The Magic of Trees, Hatje Cantz

Hesse, Herman, 1984, Bäume, Insel Verlag

A September trip to Bruges

We went to Bruges for a short holiday over the weekend from 18th September to 22nd. There was a quick stop for a few hours in Bruxelles - I went to see half of the Royal Museum of Art and History as there was not much time. I do wish I had had more time, the ethnographic collections looked very good.

This museum was extremely quiet. It seemed to be a bit in the vein of the British Museum, but there very few visitors. For someone whose knowledge of medieval arts and crafts of the low countries is pretty scant, there were some good pieces of wood work - carved altarpieces, and religious paintings on panel. Some very good carvings of figures in wood looked very impressive, and of course there were great tapestries of all types - small precious things that looked as if they were for private contemplation, with gold and silver thread that would have sparkled in the candle light of dark rooms, as well as large wall coverings. There was also some historical glass and some ceramics from the 1920s, which I did not find particularly inspiring.

Having seen these rooms I was nearly out of time, but there was a bit of time to look at the shop for any contemporary jewellery and ceramic. After this I went to have a fleeting look at the native North American displays and wished I had had more time..... There were wonderful things using feathers, carved birds and animals, clothing and ritual objects. A film showed a traditional bird dance which was intriguing. If I go back to Bruxelles it would be good to revisit this museum.

Bruges was a different sort of place to Bruxelles, which had felt very noisy, busy and with many people buzzing about. Bruges is clearly a place of tourism, with many arrangements set up for the short visit - boat trips, horse trips and bus rides for example. We visited the Groeningemuseum, which houses medieval and renaissance art. This was a very good thing, there were fine pieces richly painted in detail. We enjoyed this very much and I also found the temporary exhibition of prints and drawings by Frank Branwyn in the Arenthuis very stimulating. These works concentrated on people at work and social studies. Brangwyn had worked in the studio of William Morris, and you did get than sense of a social conscience that Morris had spoken of in Brangwyn's pictures - there were good strong lines and solid marks showing people in physical labour and religious studies of the cruciphixion story.

We also went to see some works by Picasso and other Modernists, an exhibition mainly of prints, but there were some interesting sketches by Renoir and Monet and others that showed more of their working methods, which was interesting. The museums in Bruges are all very close to each other, and of course there are also churches to visit. One, the Church of Our Lady, houses a Madonna and Child sculpture by Michaelangelo. A tightly composed classical figure, precise and naturalistic. At some point they placed in a large voluptuous baroque wall piece, with niches holding large sculptures with drapery flowing with abandon around their bodies. Interesting to see this change in style between the renaissance observation and representation and this theatrical energy of a later generation.

Otherwise we did all the other touristic things - went on a boat trip which is of course a great way to see a city anyway, I have been on such boats in London, Copenhagen and Amsterdam and every time you see the city afresh somehow. We went to various squares, experienced a 'car free' Sunday with exercise classes on the large central square, and went to flea markets to see if we could find interesting Belgian things, but disappointingly there was very little of interest, mainly people shedding their stuff or selling pretend-interesting objects that really did not warrant the energy or money spent on them. I bought a piece of vintage silver, a brooch that has some use value and is a unique craft object.