London Calling...An American Idiot
2/4/16
I’ve been quite busy lately fulfilling the other role of being an art educator: actually making art. Teaching full time, working during the summers, and being a parent has always made it challenging to carve out time for art production. Having the gift of time during my sabbatical experience last year left me with no excuses.
Although my sabbatical is over and I'm back in the classroom, I’m riding the artistic wave as long as I can. Through the power of Facebook and word of mouth I’ve been fortunate to sell several paintings and have opportunities to display/exhibit my work. It’s “small-time” but flattering nonetheless. This art-making process is chronicled in the post, Refurbishing and Recycling Childhood Memories.
Spending my free time painting has taken me away from writing new entries. With that in mind, this entry is light on words and heavy on photos. I do have a few entries “in progress” and I hope to have them posted in the coming months.
I’ve been quite busy lately fulfilling the other role of being an art educator: actually making art. Teaching full time, working during the summers, and being a parent has always made it challenging to carve out time for art production. Having the gift of time during my sabbatical experience last year left me with no excuses.
Although my sabbatical is over and I'm back in the classroom, I’m riding the artistic wave as long as I can. Through the power of Facebook and word of mouth I’ve been fortunate to sell several paintings and have opportunities to display/exhibit my work. It’s “small-time” but flattering nonetheless. This art-making process is chronicled in the post, Refurbishing and Recycling Childhood Memories.
Spending my free time painting has taken me away from writing new entries. With that in mind, this entry is light on words and heavy on photos. I do have a few entries “in progress” and I hope to have them posted in the coming months.
This entry takes place in March of 2015. After a five-week stay in Finland, I departed for London turning a four-hour layover back to Baltimore into a four-day stay. This was planned in advance, and seemed like a grand way to pull my family into my sabbatical experience. I was encouraged by my school’s administration and the donors of the sabbatical to include my family in some facet. Despite my encouragement however, there was no interest for them to join me in my travels to Finland. I can’t blame them, it was after all the coldest month of the year in Helsinki, and I had plenty of work to do visiting schools.
Four days in London is not nearly enough time for a visit. Most of the trip was planned on the spot but we did have one absolute: visiting the Warner Bros. Harry Potter studio. We are HUGE fans of the Harry Potter series and it would be a crime if we did not take advantage of exploring the studios to see all the artistic components that went into designing the movies.
The details that went into the props, set designs, clothing, creatures, etc., were all laid out for us to carefully examine at our leisure. Most of this work was shown on screen for a fleeting moment, and some of it was rarely seen at all: preliminary drawings, paintings, models, and molds. The displays within the tour are a wonderful tribute to the artists for their painstaking work; certainly better than the tiny credit lines that quickly scroll at the end of the movie!
Four days in London is not nearly enough time for a visit. Most of the trip was planned on the spot but we did have one absolute: visiting the Warner Bros. Harry Potter studio. We are HUGE fans of the Harry Potter series and it would be a crime if we did not take advantage of exploring the studios to see all the artistic components that went into designing the movies.
The details that went into the props, set designs, clothing, creatures, etc., were all laid out for us to carefully examine at our leisure. Most of this work was shown on screen for a fleeting moment, and some of it was rarely seen at all: preliminary drawings, paintings, models, and molds. The displays within the tour are a wonderful tribute to the artists for their painstaking work; certainly better than the tiny credit lines that quickly scroll at the end of the movie!
Other highlights of our trip included the National Gallery, which I preferred over the Tate Modern. I had been fascinated by the images of Ai Wei Wei’s sunflower seed exhibit at the Tate in 2011, and I was hoping there would be something comparable, but no such luck.
Having been abroad several times before I had created a system in my head for converting euros to dollars. For items under 50 euros I generally tag on an extra $5, items under 100 euros add $10, and so on. I like to over estimate so that when I make my calculations later on, I’m happy to know I didn’t spend as much as I thought. This process worked fairly well while I was in Helsinki for five weeks prior to heading to London. Unfortunately, I continued this mindless conversion while in London forgetting that the dollar is much weaker than the pound. When I tallied up four days of receipts and realized my oversight, all I could think of were the lyrics to “American Idiot”. Yup, that was me.
Enjoy the photos. The next entry will include France, Van Gogh, and mental illness. In the meantime, get out there and enjoy life, make and create!
Having been abroad several times before I had created a system in my head for converting euros to dollars. For items under 50 euros I generally tag on an extra $5, items under 100 euros add $10, and so on. I like to over estimate so that when I make my calculations later on, I’m happy to know I didn’t spend as much as I thought. This process worked fairly well while I was in Helsinki for five weeks prior to heading to London. Unfortunately, I continued this mindless conversion while in London forgetting that the dollar is much weaker than the pound. When I tallied up four days of receipts and realized my oversight, all I could think of were the lyrics to “American Idiot”. Yup, that was me.
Enjoy the photos. The next entry will include France, Van Gogh, and mental illness. In the meantime, get out there and enjoy life, make and create!