It’s no secret that I am a big fan of street art. I don’t mean scrawled graffiti, or even more precisely worked ‘tags’. I mean art. Like many cities today, Sofia offers a dedicated street art tour; we saw signs advertising it in several places. But we chose not to take the tour, instead preferring to seek out street art at our own pace.
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I never tire of wandering the streets of Paris; there is always so much to see and to photograph. From elegant buildings to quirky details and of course plenty of street art.
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The Marais is one of the loveliest and most fashionable districts of Paris. The name means ‘marshland’ because the original village here was built on a marsh, but there are no signs of that these days! Instead there are elegant buildings, pretty squares and of course the Parisian staples of great little cafés.
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We only occasionally get the chance to watch a street artist at work. Somehow these works of art seem to appear almost magically on our streets, created perhaps overnight while we sleep? Some of course take many hours, even days, to complete. But others are much simpler and while they may have less impact still brighten our day.
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Burning Man is a unique event that takes place every year in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, USA. But we are not in the deserts of Nevada; we are among the green hills of England’s Peak District.
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How many windows is too many? That was the question facing many seventeenth century property owners. In 1696 a window tax was introduced in England and Wales. The more windows a building had, the more its owner had to pay.
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For my next set of Thursday Trios I am focusing on art. I’ve borrowed a quote from Camus, a French author and philosopher, an absurdist and existentialist. I've also arguably borrowed a certain sense of the absurd for this gallery, but I don’t claim it to be philosophical in any sense!
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Some sculptures are all the better for being in just the right place; think of the Angel of the North or Statue of Liberty, for example. And in its own less dramatic way that is true of the Conversation Piece in South Shields.
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Most people visit Cape Verde for the classic three Ss: sun, sea and sand. We came mainly for the first of these, in search of some February warmth. In truth it wasn’t as warm as we’d hoped, so maybe it was a good thing we had relatively little interest in the other two.
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On the slopes of Sandia Peak, above Albuquerque in New Mexico, we found a most unusual sight. As soon as I read about this quirky museum I knew that it was a ‘must see’. We both love those idiosyncratic places that seem to define a US road trip for us; and this is one of the best we have come across.
