Feb 29

Today was Dioramas last day to rent out space until August 2009. Now we are working on the summer festival and trying to get everything moved out.

Mar 2

Today I went to the V&A Natural History museum. It was really interesting. They have a lot of dinosaur bones and fossils. I have never really seen dinosaur bones before, and especially not that many. There were a lot of weird skeletons of animals I never knew existed.

Mar 6

Today I met with a guy who sold me a Neil Young ticket. When I tried to get them from Hammersmith Apollo they were sold out for all the dates. Jacob told me about a website called scarlet mist where people sell and buy tickets to London concerts for the original price, so I found this guy on it. He sold it for the same price he bought it for, and it looked real and it had the receipt ticket and a hologram stamp on it. I really hope he didn't rip me off, but I don't think he did. I am excited!

Then I went over to the Victoria and Albert Museum and saw the rest of it. It is a pretty good museum, but I think the best part was the Middle Eastern and Asian section that I saw before.

Mar 7

Today I went to this gallery called Photofustion that Mark told me about. It was a very nice place, but it was only two rooms. There was just one artist featured, but I thought he was really good. His tagline for his work was "I don't take photographs, I make photographs." Everything he did was staged. There were a series of three photographs that I really liked. He had a single flower against a black background, and a light behind the flower illuminating the colors. He then had a butterfly flying around the flower. But he used a very slow shutter speed, capturing all the swirls and turns that the butterfly had made, leaving a white ghost like trail behind. It was neat. Another series was a beer bottle, cup of tea, and foamy coffee all being dropped, and the photo was taken just as the glass is shattering on the ground and the liquid is in mid air. It was all beautifully done, and I bet it was fun doing those shots too.

Mar 8

Today I went to Tate Britain for the first time. It is a pretty good art museum. All of the work that is in the gallery is done by British people. I went into two special exhibitions today because Lawry gave me her Tate membership card. The first on I saw was called Camden artists. It was really good. There were lots of scenes from London in the 20s-40s ish time period. I also saw the Peter Doig exhibit, which I really liked a lot. He is a modern artists who does these great large scale colorful paintings, some are more realistic, and others are more abstract and dreamlike. I like his color choices, most everything in this exhibit was very aesthetically beautiful, and also very thoughtful. I saw about half of the museum before leaving, it is decent, but the special exhibits were better than the permanent collection.

Mar 9

I went to Tate Britain again today. I wanted to finish up all that I didn't see yesterday. I saw the modern art section. It was okay, some of it was weird and boring. But they have a wing of works by Turner. There were three big rooms of only his paintings, and I really liked that. As he grew older his work morphed into more time spent on the colors, and less on detail and sharpness. So if you look at some of his paintings close up, you have no idea what it is, and it just looks like some blurry blobs, but then you step back and realize that it's a great landscape, or a boat on the sea, or whatever. He's great.