I was actually pretty disappointed by the river cruise. Not quite sure why we didn't do this in the beginning of the trip. Perhaps the day we did the London Eye, or maybe the next morning. But instead a tour of London by the water was held on one of our last days, where we had already seen all these things. I understand we took the cruise to see the Royal Observatory, I thought the Prime Meridian was pretty cool, did not enjoy the walk up in the rain but Mary and I had quite an experience with our handy piece of crap umbrellas on the way down. It was unfortunate how rainy it was. And I was disappointed to hear that they had a beam of light that shined over the city to mark the Prime Meridian in the air. That is something I really think I would have enjoyed.
After that we headed back into London to go to the National Portrait Gallery. Another thing I didnt quite understand why we didn't go there the same day we were at the National Gallery. Felt as though this day was a little backwards. But anyways, I really enjoyed the Portrait Gallery. It was nice to see alot of space devoted to photographers. One of the things I enjoy the most is to take portraits so I appreciated the Portrait Gallery. I am a fan now of Jason Bell's photographs. He photographed people in NYC to lived in both London and NYC. I also liked the portraits by Dmitri Kasterine. The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize was a nice collection of portraits. There were many that I walked passed but there were numerous names I took note of. I like that the Wessing Show is contemporary young photographers and ameuter photographers too. It's always nice to see what people such as myself are doing and that it is possible to get in such a show. I enjoy walking around and seeing things I like and how I myself can execute a similiar feeling or walk around and see how I don't like one's printing quality.
On one of my free afternoons I stopped in at a gallery right around the corner from our flat called the October Gallery. This space was very small but held large scale works by Iranian artist, Golnaz Fathi. Her works are large scale paintings of Persian calligraphy. Though I had no idea what they said it was really interesting to look at them. They became more about the layering of textures to me. The patterns. There were two very large scroll type pieces that hung high on the ceiling and laid on the wall and folded out onto the floor. Her way of combining very traditional practices of calligraphy and the contemporary color swatches gave these pieces a very bold yet minimal feeling to them.
The East End Gallery Hunt came at the end of our trip. Was hoping these gallery were going to be in a closer proximity to each other. Don't know if by this time in the trip I was reaching my height of art information overload.
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