What else did I do after the Ai WeiWei gallery?
The Soane Museum
I did successfully enough tried to find the Soane museum with my three classmates who got a little bit lost in the city area but did manage to find it in the end. When we got there, we had to remove any bagging and loose items before entering the old looking house which is turned into a museum full of relics and free to enter.
- Old Books
So… as I entered this victorian style house, it had a narrow hallway and a living room to the right where it housed a wide collection of old books in high display book shelves. Also the thing that drawed my eye the most was seeing some very old greek vases in which some were real but I heard that some were copied because of the war that was going on at the time.
- Chinese & Greek vases
Also he had some very nice twin vases which sat either side of the humongous greek vase and these twin chinese vases looked looked just as big that were green in colour to represent the special colour of jade. They were so inspiring to see as I myself deal with different cultures in my artwork and it is like seeing many cultures together at once in this museum. This was the kind of impression that I started to get.
- Roman & Greek sculptural ruins
Yeah… We came across many narrow corridors to get to different rooms that had different classifications but I thought this room really was the best. In this room or I should say ‘Open hallway’ seemed like the most spacious hallway we’d seen with the window on the top of the open hallway just letting a little fragment of light in on all of the sculptures.
There were a lot of sculptures there that go as far back as 1000bc like parts from pillars and very immense detail and highly preserved. Also there were a ancient Egyptian sarcophagus ‘without lid’ so we be able to see inside of it and saw the trace of the girl that was buried inside it. This was all inspiring to me as it opened my eyes more to seeing how art starts forming from different past and culture.
- Paintings
The painting room was in fact open and when I got there, there was a small enough room that housed some very famous paintings. One famous painting that I noticed was Canaletto, He was the most famous painter of Venice scenes in Italy and felt good to be standing right in front of one of his biggest paintings he made.
Canaletto’s painting was a classical one that I had done my research on in the past comparing his scenes with my printing scenes that I did in my BA and is a very good artist. Some other artists paintings looked good but did not recognise them but told very interesting story as it was based on a true story and the guy that were guarding the painting told us the story which was funny and interesting.
What did I learn from this inspiration?
Well if there is one thing I have learned, is that there were many cultures in the same house and kind of made me reflect on my China and England in a way. It has also given me some historical knowledge about different cultures and stories in England that has left me wondering ever since now and still keep reflecting back to what I’d seen. It will certainly broaden my aspect of historical past and open my views more with dealing with two cultures of England and China.
