Sun-gilded buildings on the Old Town Square at around 8 p.m. One day left in Prague — we have explored it on foot from top to bottom, taken trams and the metro, and feel we’ve done it justice — but I can’t leave without taking another look at the astounding architecture. Every time you turn…
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Prague’s architecture goes all the way from Gothic and Baroque to Renaissance and Art Nouveau, so the wealth of detailing is astounding. I spend most of my time with a craned neck, looking upwards. A post dedicated to the details … Imagine stepping out onto your balcony and there are these gorgeous sculpted figures. An…
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It’s interesting being in a country where the language is so foreign you can’t get anywhere close to understanding the street signs, and just getting to say “Good morning” is a major challenge. The weird accents on the letters don’t help with deciphering the language either. The closest we’ve got to understanding any words are…
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How fortuitous that we chanced upon an exhibition featuring a 3-in-1 … the crazy Spaniard painter Salvador Dalí, American Pop artist Andy Warhol, and Art Nouveau illustrator Alphonse Mucha. Granted, it was mainly posters, illustrations, postcards, calendars and so on, but we were excited nonetheless. Andy Warhol’s silkscreens of famous personalities (where he introduced the…
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Today I’m just having fun with colour and graphic lines and shapes … lots of inspiration in the Big Apple. Anyone recognise Lucy Liu below? For those who are perplexed, this is actually a flashlight-reflecting umbrella in that Aladdin’s Cave of all things photographic, B&H Photo. A subterranean passageway to a train platform in North White Plains.  …
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What strikes you about New Yorkers is the yadda-yadda-yadda. It’s constant. Everyone walks around with a white golf tee hanging out their ear; everyone is hustling or in the throes of clinching a deal. They bark into their phones — held horizontally like Kim Kardashian — or they talk to themselves (they have an earpiece) or…
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This is before even getting to the Whitney, wall decoration in the Meatpacking District. Our interest was piqued by an exhibition at the Whitney Museum — artists of the 1960s and 1970s who used bold, saturated, hallucinatory colour to stimulate perceptions. It was at that time that acrylic paint became newly available, with a greater…
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… ahead of our return to the Big Apple after having lived there for two-and-a-half years, ending 2011. Yikes! Sounds so long ago. For now, two of my favourite downtown buildings, the Chrysler Building and the Flat Iron. In the Chrysler Building, the details are an ode to the Machine Age of the 1920s with…
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It takes a lot of pushing and shoving by all of us — a boatful of snorkellers — to shift the Rubber Duck into the shallows before we all clamber clumsily in. With a spurt of engine power, the boat slices through cresting waves towards heaving walls of water that appear insurmountable, yet the vessel…
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Reflection … the projection of mirror-like images … alternatively, careful/long consideration or thought. The two don’t appear to have much connection, do they? South Africa is engaging in much serious reflecting right now, since our national elections are just around the corner. Maybe it’s about thoughts being so long and considered that they’re eventually reflected back…
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