Da Vinci
You all know the name, the skill, and the beautiful quality of even his unfinished, “The Virgin and Child with St Anne and John the Baptist.” Well, go ahead and be jealous, because I got to spend time with it/him on a one to one basis. We talked, laughed, cried, it was a beautiful experience. Seriously, I’ve always wanted to see that work up-close and personal, because no pic I’ve seen does it justice. His unparalleled modeling of faces and gesture like quality of the clothes gives this work a life I was taken aback by. After leaving the National Gallery, which also had Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Leonardo, Picasso, Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Constable, Rubens, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, just to name a few. Go ahead, you may now be jealous.
After leaving the National Gallery we went to visit Freda, a graphic designer with her roots (and part of her business) in El Salvador invited the graphic designer’s, and me, to her house for a Q & A. As we boarded the train to Norbury I was able to reminisce, and remember all the history that was painting for painting, year for year in that gallery. The apartments along the way are all squeezed together, some two stories, some three, some four and all were made of brick. There is a feeling of permanence here that we don’t have back home. All the buildings are 300-400 years old or more, and all of them are made to last either 300-400 years more. It’s incredible sense of stability, consistency, and immobility.