Category Archives: Art and architecture

Aug 27 2016
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Art and architecture, Daily Post, Sport

St. James’ Park

Saturday 27th August 2016, 6.05pm (day 1,829)

St James's Park, 27/8/16

St. James’ Park, Newcastle, is the greatest, and certainly the largest, true city-centre football stadium in England. Capacity over 50,000, and all ten minutes’ walk from the train station — well, 10 minutes to the bottom of the main stand anyway. If you are an away fan you then have about another 10 minutes’ climbing of stairs to negotiate: I don’t think I’ve ever been so high up in the air watching a football match before. Good views therefore; better than anything we endured on the pitch today, a poor performance (Newcastle United 2, Brighton and Hove Albion 0).

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Aug 08 2016
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

Conwy Castle

Monday 8th August 2016, 10.55am (day 1,810)

Conwy Castle, 8/8/16

Conwy is a few miles from Llandudno. First-ever visit there today, and what a beautiful and interesting place — there were many potential candidates for today’s photo. But in the end, had to go with the castle. This is premium castle. Built, along with its accompanying town walls, in only four years, in the 13th century by Edward I. Public engineering projects in this epoch take longer (look at Manchester city centre for instance). Then again this was a fortress of occupation: no Welsh were allowed to live within the Conwy walls.

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Jul 12 2014
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

St Michael’s church, Mytholmroyd

Saturday 12th July 2014, 5.35pm (day 1,052)

St Mike's church, 12/7/14

Back home. The trouble with committing (still) to do this every day is that some days, even when the light is good (warm, sunny day today) and there are opportunities to get some good shots, the technique fails. I didn’t really get any good pictures today. This one is OK, a bit of a study of shape and texture, but that’s about it.

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Mar 08 2013
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

Sydney Opera House

Thursday 7th March 2013, 3.45pm (day 560)

Sydney Opera House, 7/3/13

Task one on arrival in Sydney – head straight to this place. I’ve long admired this building from afar and I was very keen to see it for real – and my high opinion of it has been in no way diminished by being up close to it. (Although I never realised it’s effectively three separate buildings: and it’s also somewhat smaller than I thought.)

Task two – take a photograph of it that is not the same old cliched photo of it that everyone else takes. How have I done?

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Dec 10 2011
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Art and architecture, Daily Post Gallery

World’s Worst Piece of Public Art

Friday 9th December 2011, 3.15pm (day 106)

Peter the Great, 9/12/11

Day off today. I went to see some excellent art in the Pushkin museum, including a Caravaggio exhibition. Now I don’t know a great deal about art but Caravaggio seems to me someone who really knows about lighting and movement. His paintings are 400 years old but look like they could be freeze-frames from modern movies. He’s a long way ahead of his contemporaries. However, for most of the time after his death in 1610 he was forgotten.

This, on the other hand, is Tsereteli’s monumental statue of Peter the Great by the Moscow River. It cost millions of roubles and can be seen for miles around. it looks like something my 8-year-old son would draw and every Muscovite I have spoken to about it, hates it. Tsereteli is a big mate of the mayor of Moscow, Mr Luzhkov, which may, or of course may not, explain why this monstrosity exists.

Somehow I suspect that in 400 years’ time, only one of these artists is going to be remembered.

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