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Wordless Wednesday: Renaissance Florence
Sculptures
Swell Festival 2016 – part 2
On my last post I shared some of the sculptures featured in the Swell 2016 Sculpture Festival. As promised, here is a part two of my selection of images.
Pyramid made of bread cartons
Project Bread
Currumbin Beach
View of Surfers Paradise from Currumbin Rock
Venomous Blue – Blue ringed octopus
Swell Festival 2016 – part 1
Up before the sun and with a hit of caffeine, Hubby, Bundy and I were ready to head south to Currumbin, host to the 2016 Swell Sculpture Festival. Sunrise and sunset are the best times to experience the festival, fewer crowds and better light for taking photos. Bundy loves the festival, it is his chance to run around on the sand and meet a few new faces (or sniff new butts to put it in dog terms). Alphy the turtle is the big hit this year, as are the huge deck chairs but I really love the dog walker sculpture and the timber freight boxes lying on the sand. With so many sculptures I have decided to break up the photos and share them in two lots, you will see more of the dog walker and other wonderful works of art sometime next week.
Which one is your favourite?
Azzedine Alaïa and the Borghese
Poor planning on our last trip to Rome resulted in me being unable to get a ticket to see the Borghese Gallery, I was devastated and vowed that it wouldn’t happen again. After failing to successfully purchase tickets through the Borghese Gallery I decided to pay that little bit extra and get skip the line tickets through Viator. Our entry time was at 9am and we had until 11am to view the entire gallery, at 11am they kicked us all out and the next group of visitors went through. Two hours doesn’t seem like much, we could have easily spent another hour at least in the gallery especially with the addition of garments from the Azzedine Alaïa collection being on display.
The ‘no photo’ rule seemed to have been withdrawn from the Borghese, I vaguely recall reading in guidebooks and hearing on travel podcasts that photos were strictly prohibited and cameras would have to be stored in lockers. All around us people were taking photos with iphones, DSLRs and compact cameras and nobody seemed to care. After a few quick shots with my iphone, out came my trusty Nikon DSLR and it didn’t return to its bag until we were in the gallery gift shop.
The Azzedine Alaïa gowns on display were stunning, much thought had gone into the location of each gown or group of garments with some looking almost like a ghostly apparition among the sculptures and paintings. In the nineties I loved seeing Azzedine Alaïa’s designs on supermodels such as Naomi Campbell and Stephanie Seymour, they wore them so well and the gowns looked like works of art. Moving around the gallery, my eyes flicked from classical sculptures to fashion items and while others crowded around Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne I was taking photos of the nearest design by Azzedine Alaïa. This gave me one advantage, by the time I had finished admiring the design most of the group had moved on and I could enjoy the sculptures in relative quiet.
The Borghese Gallery is a most magnificent place to visit, I walked out of there feeling extremely happy and it would have to rate as one of my most enjoyable gallery and/or museum experiences. The restricted number of visitors at any one time certainly enhances the experience, having been to the Vatican Museum where numbers do not appear to be limited and large tour groups crowd the halls and stairwells, I much prefer having to book in advance for a nominated time slot.
Young Sick Bacchus, Caravaggio
Woman with dog and child
The Rape of Persephone, Bernini
The Borghese Hermaphroditus
Pauline Bonaparte 1805-1808, Antonio Canova
Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne 1622-1624
A sample from Swell 2014
The annual Swell Sculpture Festival is currently underway at Currumbin Beach Queensland. Traffic was bumper to bumper and parks were scarce but after 20 minutes of stalking potential parking spots we were successful and joined the hordes on the esplanade at Currumbin Beach. Bundy always enjoys an evening stroll, he and the hubby spent most of their time people watching and patiently waiting for me to finish taking photographs. Here is a sample of some of my favourites from this years festival.
Enjoy!
Swell Sculpture Festival, Currumbin
Sculptures by the Sea with my iPhone
I never thought that the opportunity to see Sculptures by the Sea would arise this year, there was just too much going on that required my attention (and my budget). As it turns out, a trip to Sydney popped up and U was able to take my Dad on a tour of Tamarama and Bondi to view some in incredible art. Lacking my DSLR meant relying on my iPhone and lack of a laptop has me two finger typing this post on the iPhone WordPress app, so please excuse any typos 🙂
The day was spectacular, school kids and tourists were out in full force and everyone had some sort of camera, my photos will not be unique but I don’t care, I had a great time.
The last of Swell 2013 (part 3)
The last of my images from the Swell Sculpture Festival 🙂
More culture at Swell 2013 (part 2)
Walking along such a popular and pretty part of the coast at sunset is a pleasant experience any time of year, during Swell it is made more interesting by the addition of sculptures scattered across the sand and along the esplanade. There are children, dogs and happy snappers everywhere, and even though the signs all say ‘Please don’t climb on the sculptures’, many of them are begging for interaction and it is possible to walk around and through some of the installations. Looking back, I have to wonder whether a theme for the festival could be one of interaction, encouraging children and adults to participate in the piece, firing up their imagination and expressing their creativity.
This gallery is the second of three galleries that I’ll be posting and featuring work from the Swell Sculpture Festival, I hope you enjoy the photographs as much as I enjoyed the exhibition.
A bit of culture at the Swell 2013 Sculpture Festival (part 1)
The Swell Sculpture Festival at Currumbin is an annual event, this year it was held September 13-22 and featured 50 artworks that ranged from inspiring to quirky, in an array of sizes from small enough to sit on a lamp table to artwork so large that children would need more than a couple of sheets to turn them into cubby houses. The festival has become a bit of a pilgrimage for me, introduced to the event by an artistic friend about 8 years ago, I have been back almost every year with camera in hand and I even managed to introduce a few of my friends to the event.
Last year, the hubby and I took our smallest black dog to Currumbin and watched the sunrise over the festival, it was an awesome experience and I managed to get some pretty good photos in the soft morning light. This year we decided to venture down in the afternoon and see the exhibition as the sun set, the place was packed with others like us, cameras and iPhones in hand, generating thousands of images in one evening so I can only imagine how many photos of the sculptures are now on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. As usual, I took a few hundred photos and sorting through them has been a bit of a process because some of the sculptures really captured my attention resulting in photographs from several different viewpoints, as well as photographing them in the changing light.
I hope you enjoy part 1 of my series of photographs from the Swell 2013 Sculpture Festival, stay tuned for more throughout the week.
Swell: the final series
Thank you to everyone who liked my shots of the Swell Sculpture Festival in previous posts: series one and series two, I now present the final series of photographs from the festival and I hope that you’ll like them as much as the earlier images.
A familiar sight on surf beaches all around the world, this piece of work attracted alot of attention and it had me wondering how they managed to keep the towels in position overnight.
Bundy loves attending the Swell Sculpture Festival, not only does he get to ride in the car and go for a paddle in the surf, he also gets to pose with the sculptures and assist with providing a sense of scale to the artwork.
This really didn’t look out of place on the beach, the large rock close to the horizon is known as ‘Elephant Rock’ and you can see the high rise landscape of Surfers Paradise in the background.
There is always a nautilus shell featured in the exhibition.
Water tanks are normally pretty plain and boring, you will find one in most Aussie backyards but they certainly don’t look like this and I can’t imagine that it would hold much water anyway.
I’m guessing the motion of waves inspired this sculpture (no I didn’t read the exhibition program), those made by water and by humans.
Like many native species, the tiger and koala are struggling to stay alive in our constantly changing environment. In Australia, Tiger conservation is a highly promoted and supported, however our native Koala which is in danger of disappearing from our region as a result of growth in development and traffic, has only recently been acknowledge as being in danger by our government. It is shameful that the majority of the Australian population take this beautiful creature for granted, its plight has become ‘invisible’.
A daylight shot of the giant mosquito featured in series one, this thing is huge!
Sums up the festival perfectly 🙂
Two Black Dogs 