Sculpture – Page 13 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

An elephant on top of a bird

It’s still Friday, right? So, an elephant:

Photoed by me in March of 2016. (I’m doing a lot of rootling in the archives just now.)

The next photo is even less technically accomplished, but it does show a bit better where I saw this elephant:

This was beside the Regent’s Canal, in the vicinity of Victoria Park. But what, I wonder, might a “Kiskadee” be? I asked The Internet, and apparently it’s a bird. Two birds, actually. The great kiskadee, and the lesser kiskadee. From this concluding paragraph at the other end of that link, it would appear that boats are more likely to be lesser kiskadees:

The aggressive great kiskadee, 23 cm (9 inches) in length, is found in woodland, savannah, and wet areas from Texas and Louisiana to Argentina. Shrikelike, it drops from a perch onto such prey as frogs and insects. It also eats fruit and is known to make shallow dives for fish. Its grass nest has a domed roof. The lesser kiskadee, 19 cm (7.5 inches) long, lives from Panama to Bolivia, always along waterways. Its call is a nondescript whistle.

Blog and learn

Battersea silhouettes

I’m still, as yet, going on quite long photo-walks. These are combined with shopping and a lot of exercise, the latter being even greater now what with public transport being off limits. There is plenty, since you ask, of social isolation, far more even than is usual. Nevertheless, I still fear that the photoing aspect may soon attract the disapproving attention of authorities, formal or informal. Too little shopping. Insufficiently strenuous exercise. Too much enjoyment. We shall see.

But in the meantime, yesterday afternoon, I checked out, again, the now stalled progress of the new apartment blocks that Frank Gehry has designed to go next to the Battersea Power Station. Last time I tried photoing these, the weather let me down. Not yesterday. Trouble was, the light was coming from behind the buildings I was most interested in photoing. But there was so much of it bouncing around that even though starting out from totally the wrong direction it was still a great improvement on the earlier trip, for photoing that Gehry-weirdness. Which I may or may not get to blogging about.

But as always, on a successful photo walk, the official destination was only part of the story. When I took another look this morning at what I had, I realised that, in among all the beautifully lit photos I photoed pointing one way, with most of the light coming from behind me, were photos like these, with me pointing the other way:

I’ve photoed that amazingly tasteless sculpture of the naked woman pointing herself forwards at the front of a boat, but this is by far the best photo of her I’ve ever photoed. The secret? Added cranes and roof clutter.

Also in the category list below is other creatures. Spot the other creature.

Perpignan photos

A year ago yesterday I was in St Cyprien, and a year ago today I was in Perpignan. However, I was in Perpignan again on January 9th of this year, when the weather was much better and hence so were my photos. Here is a selection of the photos I took then, there:

Not only was the weather better last January than it had been in April of last year; there was also a temporary Wheel in place (photos 20, 21, 22, 26). And (see photo 9) there was an exhibition on of some photos by former President of France Jacques Chirac. How about that?

A feature of any visit to Perpignan is, or should be, a journey to the department store called Galeries Lafayette (the big white building in photo 18), the views from the top of which are excellent (photos 19-28). The views on the way down from the stairs are pretty good too (photos 28-30).

Other than that, it was the usual. Amusing signs in French, roof clutter, strange plants, pollarded trees, various sorts of sculpture ancient and modern, bridges, left over Christmas signs, a motorbike. All good stuff, and all looking much better in the much better light there was in Perpignan on April 9th. Click and enjoy.

Quota Monty – quota Slim

I photoed lots of photos of the statues in Parliament, of Churchill, Mandela, Gandhi, Smuts, Lloyd George and the rest of them. Trouble was, the light was coming from the wrong direction for a lot of them.

My favourite statue photo I photoed yesterday was actually this one, of Monty:

He was facing in the right direction to get some light on his face.

But I think another got luckier with Monty is that I’ve photoed this statue a lot already, because it’s one of my favourites in all of London.

As is the one nearby of Slim, who yesterday was looking like this:

In between those two statues, there’s a statue of Brooke, which I am not quite so fond of. Nothing against Brooke, just that the statue looks, to me, a bit unconvincing, more like a caricature than a likeness.

William Huskisson and his statue

In addition to photoing ducks in Pimlico Gardens, I also photoed this statue of William Huskisson:

Harsh sunlight can sometimes turn the subtleties of sculpture into a mixture of uninformative black and equally uninformative white, so the diminished but more ambient light I had to make do with may have helped, although a bit more ambient light would have helped. And I fear that in any sort of light, the inscription on the base of the statue (in photo 2) would have been a photographic struggle. You can just about make out that William Huskisson was born in 1770 and died in 1830, but if you care about these dates, you’d probably want to check them out.

The anonymous writer of this piece about the Huskisson Statue refers to it as “rather Roman”. This is like calling an F1 racing car “rather fast” or the Milky Way “rather big”. Huskisson dates from the era when politicians liked to dress up as Romans for portraits and statues, an era that ended with the mid-nineteenth century expansion of the franchise. At which point politicians stopped dressing in a way that emphasised how different and aristocratic and educated and virtuous and special they were, and switched to being ceremonially portrayed in the way that they actually dressed in their regular lives, i.e. a smarter version of the way everyone dressed. “I’m special” turned into “I’m one of you”.

Huskisson’s main claim to fame now is that he was the first mere person ever to be killed in a railway accident. Lots of people must already have died in the course of constructing railways and locomotives, but Huskisson was the first civilian, so to speak, to be killed by this newfangled technology.

More impressive to me is that, as much as he could manage to be within the limits of political necessity and ambition, Huskisson was an old-school classical liberal. At one point in his career, somebody tried to get him to impose a legally enforced minimum wage. Huskisson brushed the notion aside as foolishness. Good for him.

Here is what the Adam Smith Institute’s Madsen Pirie has to say about Huskisson.

At the top of the Walkie Talkie

In January 2016, I and a friend visited the top of the Walkie Talkie. And in April 2016, I posted one of the photos I took during that visit, the third of these three Walkie Talkie photos. Somewhat later, in September 2017, I posted quite a few more of the photos I took during that same visit, of my fellow photoers, surprise surprise. Galleries were harder to do and to view on the old blog, blah blah, reprise. And now that galleries are so much easier to do and view, here’s another clutch of photos from that day, this time showing what the inside of the top of Walkie Talkie is like.

Getting into the Walkie Talkie was quite a palaver, and I’ll bet that hasn’t got any easier. So lots of people who will never want to endure all this palaver to visit this place themselves might nevertheless appreciate being told what the inside of it looks like. So, here is this next clutch of photos:

When you google Walkie Talkie, you get lots of moaning from a few years back about how terrible it is. I love it. And I continue to tell all my friends, and you lot, that eventually it will be greatly loved. But, this evening anyway, I could find no one who agreed with me.

Trees and other Things

I’ve not being doing much out-and-abouting lately. But yesterday the weather looked good and I managed a photo-expedition. My odyssey was a familiar one. I walked past the Channel 4 TV headquarters building to Victoria Street, checked out the progress of The Broadway. (That seems to e its name, by the way. It’s not One Broadway or Ten Broadway, just The Broadway.) Then I walked down Victoria Street to Westminster Abbey and Parliament Square, and then across Westminster Bridge and along the South Bank, and then back across the River to Embankment Tube and home again.

But I knew there’d be new stuff to see, or maybe old stuff that I had seen many times before but not noticed. Stuff like … trees. Here are sixteen of the photos I photoed, involving trees:

Trees look as they do, especially when uninterrupted by leaves, not because trees naturally look like that, but because a not-that-small and very full-time army of tree barbers and tree surgeons (that being the word they prefer), caused them to be so. Every twist and turn of a branch is a decision made by someone wielding a chainsaw (this time click on “Gallery”) or commanding someone wielding a chainsaw. If trees ever do grow “naturally”, that too is a string of decisions that someone made and went on making. Every tree in London is a clutch of design decisions.

And as I say, no leaves. Which means that other things were to be seen also. The Broadway, the Wheel, the Crimea statue, stuff around Parliament Square (much of it smothered in scaffolding), the Wheel from closer up, Big Ben (smothered in scaffolding), the sign outside Foyles saying “FOYLES”, a big puddle, and so forth and so on. Lovely.

A painter and a fish

Two more photos from October 20th 2007, and that’s really it.

First, the painter who painted Venus and The Annunciation, painting The Annunciation:

Maybe you suspected he painted his paintings at home and just taped them to the pavement. No. He painted them in situ.

And later, on the same day, a fish:

Which came out really well, I think. It’s the bottom of a street lamp. To its right, what the top of the street lamp looks like.