This is the door of a small church from the XIV Century in Idocin (Navarre) The arches are primitive Gothic. A treasure I found in my last outing.
Cee’s fun foto challenge: Arch, dome or half circle
A hundred years from now, a major museum is running an exhibition on life and culture as it was during our current historical period. You’re asked to write an introduction for the show’s brochure. What will it say?
A hundred years from now I’ll be dead, so my opinion will not be available. Besides, I’m not an expert in culture and arts. I know what I like but I can’t explain why. I’m just a journalist. The only thing I can say is that culture has a very little space in the media and the public opinion. There is no information about what our contemporary artists are doing. I’m sure that like in all crisis periods there are hidden geniuses working in something creative and innovative in all kind of arts. Only they are not known yet. I think they deserve more space in the media. We need more information about culture and more space to discover true art and good artists.
From the Collection of the Artist.
If you could switch blogs with any blogger for a week, with whom would you switch and why?
Two years ago I wrote about this and I didn’t change my opinion since then. I still think I would like to have a photo blog. I love pictures and the design of the photo blogging sites. I enjoy taking pics but I’m not an artist and I don’t have the time, the gift and the equipment needed to take good pictures. So my week as a photo blogger would be a failure. It’s better to leave things like they are. I’ll continue enjoying the photoblogs I follow and trying to learn from the wonderful artists out there.
I admire photographers. I love their work. I have worked for a long time as a journalist and I came to appreciate a lot the work and the courage of the photojournalists who many times risk their security to capture an image that tells a story that the public must get to know.
My University has inaugurated recently a new Museum of Contemporary Arts with a whole section dedicated to photography. Very interesting.
Write an entire post without using any three-letter words.
Today is Good Friday. I just arrived home, back from church where I attended a special religious service in which we heard a reading of a Passion according to Saint John. A choir sang beautifully. My parish is an ancient gothic church (XIII Century). While we were praying, a group of tourists entered and began to take pictures around. We continued as if nothing happened. They’d probably seen us as another tourist attraction. A bunch of people sitting in benches listening silently to a priest in front of an ancient cross. I’m used to tourists wandering around. So I wasn’t distracted. They love to photograph high columns, pointed arches, medieval sculptures, stained glass windows, rosettes. I love to contemplate those things. Their beauty gives me peace. Helps me pray. It is part of my culture. Part of my life. Today I realised I have never made photos inside the church. Only once I took a picture of an Image of Saint Mary Virgin (Twelve Century), city patroness.
With this I guess I just wrote a post without three-letter words.
A sanctuary is a place you can escape to, to catch your breath and remember who you are. Write about the place you go to when everything is a bit too much.
Today is one of those days when I would like to disappear, and get lost in a deserted beach, to have a long walk by myself. The nasty noises from the street and my neighbors are sounding amplified in my head, hammering my brain, and getting on my nerves. There is no way to focus on what I’m writing. But I have nowhere to hide. I’m trapped at home. I can’t leave. My mom cannot stay alone. I only can go out when my sister come to take turns with me. And then, I have so many things to do when I go out, that is not restful at all. My real sanctuary these days is the old gothic church, next block. I can enter when I want, enjoy the silence, the beauty of the architecture, admire the light filtering through the colors of the magnificent stained glass rose windows, feel seven centuries of history in its walls, columns and arches, and discover the tiny red candle by the tabernacle, get close and have there a little prayer. These visits give me peace.
Our ten-minute free-write is back! Have no mercy on your keyboard as you give us your most unfiltered self (feel free to edit later, or just publish as-is).
Today I have visited a watercolors exhibition. There were paintings by a friend of mine who suffers of a severe rheumatoid arthritis with important deformations in her joints. In spite of her illness and that she needs help to walk and move (she has a special vehicle for handicapped people), she travels and works a lot in her paintings. She has learned with great teachers and now can make a living with her paintings and teaching others in her study.
In this exhibition she displays sixty watercolors with a wide variety of themes. The best thing: she sells her paintings!.
I like a lot how she captures the water in her sea landscapes and her waterfalls and the variety of greens in her forests. I love her urban landscapes.
I know her since we were very young. I remember when her illness began, and when it became so serious she had to quit her job as a clerk in a big firm. It was a drama. She was devastated.
I admire her because she was able to overcome all that and her illness through her art. It was not easy. She put a lot of effort. Above all to move around being so sick. But her determination has been stronger than her pain and she has become a pretty known painter in our region.
We’ve all heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Do you agree? is all beauty contingent on a subjective point of view?
What about all the beautiful things the universe has and we have not discovered yet? Aren’t they beautiful? Should we strip them of their quality just because a beholder didn’t made a judgment about them? I think this proves that there is something objective in beauty both in nature as in art. But at the same time there are a lot of subjectivity in the perception of beauty by the human being. What is beautiful for me can be boring and even ugly for another person. I may like a particular aesthetic quite different to a dominant aesthetic. I think beauty is there for us, to discover and enjoy it, and depends of the sensibility of each person what we find in it. So an objective quality and a subjective perception.
“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”
G.K. Chesterton
