Art and Brick Lane

Here are few recent updates! 

Today we were able to go as a class to Degas exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts. Degas is most known for his paintings of ballerinas and dancers, and that was all that was pretty much there! But it was really cool-they had a lot of his sketches and studies of the dancers and even some sculptures that he did too. They were beautiful!

Yesterday I went back to the Tate modern and saw this piece that I thought was really cool and trippy! It is a hanging upside down staircase made out of fabric. The artist is Do Ho Suh! 

On Friday for art class we went to the Courtauld Gallery and I loved it! There were a lot of great impressionist and post-impressionist painters that were brilliant! 

I thought that mom and dad might like this one! This artist's name is Andre Derain.

This famous painting, A Bar at the Folies Bergere by Edouard Manet was there!!! When I learned about in my humanities class I wasn't really crazy about it, but seeing it in real life made me love it!

Yes. THE SELF PORTRAIT OF MY LOVE VINCENT VAN GOGH! It was there! And it is amazing. I just love that man so much!

Last week we went to see a concert. It was this french guy named Yann Tiersen, who has some beautiful piano music. We thought it was going to be a classical piano concert, but it ended up being a techno rock concert haha but it was still fun! This band called Lanterns on the Lake opened for them, and this guy in the band totally reminded me of Jackson with long hair and a mustache! 

Then I saw a large mustache! On Saturday I went to the Brick Lane market and I saw this on the way. I guess the men do this thing in London where they grow a mustache to raise awareness for prostate cancer. Here is more about it, I thought it was pretty funny!

http://www.eastlondonlines.co.uk/2010/11/free-moustache-trim-for-movember/

The Brick Lane is a cool part of London that had a lot of graffiti and vintage shops. Here is some graffiti that I thought was groovy and reminded me of the artist, Liechtenstein!

This are some polka dot shirts in a cool Vintage shop called, Blitz Blitz!

A little shop on Brick Lane with a cello :)

Love you guys and miss you!!

Westminster, Les Miserables and Graffiti!

On Wednesday we went to Westminster Abbey and it was really neat! It is so beautiful inside, and I did not know how many different people were buried there! Like Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth I and her sister Mary, Mary Queen of Scots, Isaac Newton, Henry Chaucer and so many more! Westminster was first built in 1245 by Henry III as his burial place. It is the traditional place for coronation and burial of English monarchs. And it was where the Royal Wedding was!  

 Me, Kendal, Katie and Lisa in front of Westminster!

Westminster Abbey

For our religion class we had to go to this chapel called the John Wesley chapel. John Wesley started the Methodist church in England, and this is the very fist Methodist chapel he built. These really sweet elderly people work there and gave us a tour. We told our guide, Keith, that we went to school in Utah and he asked us if we were Mormon! haha I guess even Englanders know Utah's history! 

On Wednesday night Kendal, Katie and I went to see Les Miserables! We went to the theater an hour before the play started and we were able to get tickets that were worth 50pounds for only 27 pounds, and they were good seats too! It was my first time ever seeing it, and it was amazing! I cried like a baby and the music was great! I know that mom would love it. The only songs I recognized were the ones mom would sing-There is a castle on a cloud and can you hear the people sing! I am in love with Jean Valjean!

I saw this the other day and I knew mom would love it-it's a Tiffany & Co. taxi cab! 

All of us had to do a collaboration project, and my group decided to do graffiti! So at night we went to a skatepark to do our project. But it is a skatepark were tagging is legal, so we really weren't that hardcore haha. But we still felt rebellious! We were all in charge of making a letter to spell out CREATE, and I did the E! 

This is what it looked like when it was finished! Word straight up!

I love you guys and miss you so much! I hope you are doing well-talk to you soon! 

Frieze Art Fair!

On Saturday we were able to go to the Frieze Art Fair, a contemporary art fair that goes on every October in Regents Park. They set up this gigantic tent and gallery rooms and had more than 170 different galleries there. It was so cool! It was for sure THE art scene, and there were a lot of great contemporary artists. I know that mom and dad would have liked some of the things there-it is so great that I have parents who like contemporary art! I mean we do have an orange bamboo forest in our living room! ;) Here are some things that I thought were exciting!

Painting by Gerhard Richter-I really like him.

Here is a Frank Stella for mom and dad!

This is a self portrait done by Ryan Gander. I really like how he used glass panels.

A neon light piece done by Tracey Emin. I am really digging neon right now! This fair had a lot of different neon light pieces and fluorescent colors which were fun.

I didn't get this artist's name, but these are pieces of furniture with a kind of rainbow vortex carved into them that I thought was cool!

Piece by Anish Kapoor. I really like him.

I thought mom and dad would like this one!

This is a sculpture by John Chamberlain, another artist I really like. He does these abstract expressionist sculptures with smashed car parts!

PEOPLE OF THE FRIEZE ART FAIR

Another cool thing about the fair was the people that were there! Many of them were funky art hipsters! And there were tons of wealthy people there that were buying paintings for millions of pounds. I know that this is really stalker-like and kind of weird, but I took some pictures of people there because I wanted you too to experience their awesomeness! So here they are! 

I loved this girl's hair!

And this girl's hair too!

I also got a granola bar from a little cafe they had set up called Gail's, and it was the best granola bar I have had in my life!!

Southwest Trip

Hey guys! So this last week we went on a tour of southwest England and it was amazing! It is for sure one of my favorite trips so far. This whole week we spent a lot of time outside hiking around the coast, and it was beautiful! It was nice to take a break from being in the city. Here are some pictures from the trip!

On Monday we went to the City of Bath. It is a really beautiful city, and the houses are all very organized and clean. Here are some interesting things about Bath:

It is where Jane Austen died. The house that she lived in is still there, but it is not open to the public-i am so sorry mom!

The city was founded as a spa and was called Aquae Sulis, meaning "the waters of Sulis" in Latin by the Romans in 34 AD.

They built baths and a temple in the valley of the River Avon around hot springs, and the baths are still there today.

The Roman Baths. I got to dip my finger in that jello green water! It was an authentic bathing experience. It kind of reminds me of the Anthem Country Club water haha. It was really cool though to walk through and see the ruins of the different baths that were there. 

The streets of Bath

Us in front of the Roman Baths

Me, Katie, Alison, Camilia,Sara

This is the Royal Crescent, a really pretty grassy area. It is rumored that Nicolas Cage lives just up the street from here, so I pretty much met him!

 This is Glastonbury Abbey. Legend says Joseph of Arimathea brought Jesus here and they built the old wattle and daub church. I don't know if that is really true, but i thought it was interesting. The Abbey was standing in 600 AD but was destroyed by a fire in 1184 and rebuilt. The one here are the remains from 1184 to 1539, when the Abbey was seized on the orders of King Henry VIII during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In 1191 it was legend that they found King Arthur and Queen Guinevere's grave, and they are still buried there. They are not sure if it is King Arthur, but there was a tag that had his name on it. King Arthur died from a blow to the head while in battle, and the skull also had a fracture in it. Sorry for this boring history lesson! I just thought it was kinda cool!

Katie and I in front of Glastonbury Abbey.

 Our group split up into two groups and one group went with Peter Everett and did a hike from a town on the coast called Tintagel to another town called Boscastle. The other half went with John Bennion and started in Boscastle and stayed in Tintagel. I was in Peter's group, and the hike along the coast was beautiful! Here is a picture of me and my friend Becca.

This is right outside of Boscastle.

This is Boscastle. I think that it just might be my favorite place in the world! It is this really small, but gorgeous town right on the coast. In the back is the village, but that is pretty much all that is there!

This is the hostel we stayed in that was right by the water. It was actually a really nice. We had the whole place to ourselves! Peter cooked us a yummy vegetarian pasta dinner with Cadbury chocolate for dessert. It was a lot of fun!

Here is a picture of the room I stayed in the hostel. It was really cute!

The next day we all met back together in Tintagel and went to Tintagel castle. This is the beach of Tintagel and we walked up the stairs to get to the castle ruins. It was so fun to play on the beach. It brought back so many memories of our family trips to the beach and the Outer Banks of course! Yeah baby!

The door into the castle ruin. Tintagel is on the coast of Cornwall, England, and this is a medieval ruin that also had some Arthurian legends.

Contemplating life on the edge

Me, Madeline, Madison, Allie and Becca

Before we left London I bought some hot pink Wellies! John and his wife Karla always commented on how I could not get lost with these bad boys on. :)

Here are some of the girls in Tintagel. 

Madeline, Katie, Emily, Laura, Becca

Kinsey and Allie

This is Merlin's Cave. It goes from on side of the beach to the other!

In Tintagel I got some clotted cream and black current ice cream-it was amazing!

This is Alison and I at Lands End-the further most tip of England! It was really misty and foggy when we where there and reminded me of Wuthering Heights! 

The next day we went to St. Michael's Mount, this tidal island right off the coast of Cornwall. There is a causeway that you can walk over onto the island when the tide is low, or if the tide is high you have to take a boat. We were able to walk across it and it was so cool! It has been in the middle of many sieges and battles in history. Like during the War of Roses it was seized for 6 months, and it was also the first beacon to warn against the Spanish Armada. It was also involved in the Civil War when the Royalists defended it against Oliver Cromwell. There are actually people who live on the island today, and one person has generations that date 300 years back! It was a really cool place! 

We also went to Stourhead Gardens which were designed by Henry Hoare II in the 1700s.

A scene from Pride and Prejudice was actually filmed in Stourhead at the Temple of Apollo! It is the rainy scene where Mr. Darcy proposes for the first time and Elizabeth shows him what is up!

Here is Camilia, Katie, Kinsey and me.

Here we are doing some morning yoga at Stonehenge. Tots def no big deal.

Stonehenge. It was crazy to be amongst the stones in real life! It is a bummer that you cant go really close to them, but they are neat!

The last place on our trip was Jane Austen's house in Chawton. I think that Jane Austen is THE woman! She is so great!

I am sorry that this is incredibly long and kinda boring! I love you guys! As Jack would say, keep it funky fresh or let it die!