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The Louvre, is the world's most-visited museum, and a historic landmark in Paris, France. It is the home of some of the best-known works of art, including the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. A central landmark of the city, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the city's 1st arrondissement (district or ward). Approximately 38,000 objects from prehistory to the 21st century are exhibited over an area of 72,735 square meters. , Attendance in 2021 was 2.8 million, the lowest since 1986, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The museum was closed for 150 days in 2020, and attendance plunged by 72 percent to 2.7 million. Nonetheless, the Louvre still topped the list of most-visited art museums in the world in 2020.
The museum is housed in the Louvre Palace, originally built in the late 12th to 13th century under Philip II. Remnants of the Medieval Louvre fortress are visible in the basement of the museum. Due to urban expansion, the fortress eventually lost its defensive function, and in 1546 Francis I converted it into the primary residence of the French Kings. The building was extended many times to form the present Louvre Palace. In 1682, Louis XIV chose the Palace of Versailles for his household, leaving the Louvre primarily as a place to display the royal collection, including, from 1692, a collection of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. In 1692, the building was occupied by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which in 1699 held the first of a series of salons. The Académie remained at the Louvre for 100 years. During the French Revolution, the National Assembly decreed that the Louvre should be used as a museum to display the nation's masterpieces.
The museum opened on 10 August 1793 with an exhibition of 537 paintings, the majority of the works being royal and confiscated church property. Because of structural problems with the building, the museum was closed in 1796 until 1801. The collection was increased under Napoleon and the museum was renamed Musée Napoléon, but after Napoleon's abdication, many works seized by his armies were returned to their original owners. The collection was further increased during the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X, and during the Second French Empire the museum gained 20,000 pieces. Holdings have grown steadily through donations and bequests since the Third Republic. The collection is divided among eight curatorial departments: Egyptian Antiquities; Near Eastern Antiquities; Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities; Islamic Art; Sculpture; Decorative Arts; Paintings; Prints and Drawings.
The Musée du Louvre contains more than 380,000 objects and displays 35,000 works of art in eight curatorial departments with more than 60,600 square metres dedicated to the permanent collection. The Louvre exhibits sculptures, objets d'art, paintings, drawings, and archaeological finds.
The Louvre Palace, which houses the museum, was begun by King Philip II in the late 12th century to protect the city from the attack from the West, as the Kingdom of England still held Normandy at the time. Remnants of the Medieval Louvre are still visible in the crypt. Whether this was the first building on that spot is not known, and it is possible that Philip modified an existing tower.
The origins of the name "Louvre" are somewhat disputed. According to the authoritative Grand Larousse encyclopédique, the name derives from an association with wolf hunting den (via Latin: lupus, lower Empire: lupara). In the 7th century, Burgundofara (also known as Saint Fare), abbess in Meaux, is said to have gifted part of her "Villa called Luvra situated in the region of Paris" to a monastery, even though it is doubtful that this land corresponded exactly to the present site of the Louvre.
The Louvre Palace changed a lot over the centuries. In the 14th century, Charles V converted the building from its military role into a residence. In 1546, Francis I started its rebuilding in French Renaissance style. After Louis XIV chose Versailles as his residence in 1682, construction works slowed to a halt. The royal move away from Paris resulted in the Louvre being used as a residence for artists, under Royal patronage.
Meanwhile, the collections of the Louvre originated in the acquisitions of paintings and other artworks by the monarchs of the House of France. Francis acquired what would become the nucleus of the Louvre's holdings, his acquisitions including Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. At the Palace of Fontainebleau, Francis collected art that would later be part of the Louvre's art collections, including Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.
The Cabinet du Roi consisted of seven rooms west of the Galerie d'Apollon on the upper floor of the remodeled Petite Galerie. Many of the king's paintings were placed in these rooms in 1673, when it became an art gallery, accessible to certain art lovers as a kind of museum. In 1681, after the court moved to Versailles, 26 of the paintings were transferred there, somewhat diminishing the collection, but it is mentioned in Paris guide books from 1684 on, and was shown to ambassadors from Siam in 1686.
By the mid-18th century there were an increasing number of proposals to create a public gallery in the Louvre. Art critic Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne in 1747 published a call for a display of the royal collection. On 14 October 1750, Louis XV decided on a display of 96 pieces from the royal collection, mounted in the Galerie royale de peinture of the Luxembourg Palace. A hall was opened by Le Normant de Tournehem and the Marquis de Marigny for public viewing of the "king's paintings" (Tableaux du Roy) on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The Luxembourg gallery included Andrea del Sarto's Charity and works by Raphael; Titian; Veronese; Rembrandt; Poussin or Van Dyck. It closed in 1780 as a result of the royal gift of the Luxembourg palace to the Count of Provence (the future king, Louis XVIII) by the king in 1778. Under Louis XVI, the idea of a royal museum in the Louvre came closer to fruition. The comte d'Angiviller broadened the collection and in 1776 proposed to convert the Grande Galerie of the Louvre – which at that time contained the plans-reliefs or 3D models of key fortified sites in and around France – into the "French Museum". Many design proposals were offered for the Louvre's renovation into a museum, without a final decision being made on them. Hence the museum remained incomplete until the French Revolution.
The Louvre finally became a public museum during the French Revolution. In May 1791, the National Constituent Assembly declared that the Louvre would be "a place for bringing together monuments of all the sciences and arts". On 10 August 1792, Louis XVI was imprisoned and the royal collection in the Louvre became national property. Because of fear of vandalism or theft, on 19 August, the National Assembly pronounced the museum's preparation as urgent. In October, a committee to "preserve the national memory" began assembling the collection for display.
The museum opened on 10 August 1793, the first anniversary of the monarchy's demise, as Muséum central des arts de la République. The public was given free accessibility on three days per week, which was "perceived as a major accomplishment and was generally appreciated". The collection showcased 537 paintings and 184 objects of art. Three quarters were derived from the royal collections, the remainder from confiscated émigrés and Church property (biens nationaux). To expand and organize the collection, the Republic dedicated 100,000 livres per year. In 1794, France's revolutionary armies began bringing pieces from Northern Europe, augmented after the Treaty of Tolentino (1797) by works from the Vatican, such as the Laocoön and Apollo Belvedere, to establish the Louvre as a museum and as a "sign of popular sovereignty".
The early days were hectic. Privileged artists continued to live in residence, and the unlabeled paintings hung "frame to frame from floor to ceiling". The structure itself closed in May 1796 due to structural deficiencies. It reopened on 14 July 1801, arranged chronologically and with new lighting and columns. On 15 August 1797, the Galerie d'Apollon was opened with an exhibition of drawings. Meanwhile, the Louvre's gallery of Antiquity sculpture (musée des Antiques), with artefacts brought from Florence and the Vatican, had opened in November 1800 in Anne of Austria's former summer apartment, located on the ground floor just below the Galerie d'Apollon.
On 19 November 1802, Napoleon appointed Dominique Vivant Denon, a scholar and polymath who had participated in the Egyptian campaign of 1798–1801, as the museum's first director, in preference to alternative contenders such as antiquarian Ennio Quirino Visconti, painter Jacques-Louis David, sculptor Antonio Canova and architects Léon Dufourny or Pierre Fontaine. On Denon's suggestion in July 1803, the museum itself was renamed Musée Napoléon.
The collection grew through successful military campaigns. Acquisitions were made of Spanish, Austrian, Dutch, and Italian works, either as the result of war looting or formalized by treaties such as the Treaty of Tolentino. At the end of Napoleon's First Italian Campaign in 1797, the Treaty of Campo Formio was signed with Count Philipp von Cobenzl of the Austrian Monarchy. This treaty marked the completion of Napoleon's conquest of Italy and the end of the first phase of the French Revolutionary Wars. It compelled Italian cities to contribute pieces of art and heritage to Napoleon's "parades of spoils" through Paris before being put into the Louvre Museum. The Horses of Saint Mark, which had adorned the basilica of San Marco in Venice after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, were brought to Paris where they were placed atop Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel in 1797. Under the Treaty of Tolentino, the two statues of the Nile and Tiber were taken to Paris from the Vatican in 1797, and were both kept in the Louvre until 1815. (The Nile was later returned to Rome, where the Tiber has remained in the Louvre to this day.) The despoilment of Italian churches and palaces outraged the Italians and their artistic and cultural sensibilities.
After the French defeat at Waterloo, the looted works' former owners sought their return. The Louvre's administrator Denon was loath to comply in absence of a treaty of restitution. In response, foreign states sent emissaries to London to seek help, and many pieces were returned, though far from all. In 1815 Louis XVIII finally concluded agreements with the Austrian government for the keeping of works such as Veronese's Wedding at Cana which was exchanged for a large Le Brun or the repurchase of the Albani collection.
For most of the 19th century, from Napoleon's time to the Second Empire, the Louvre and other national museums were managed under the monarch's civil list and thus depended much on the ruler's personal involvement. Whereas the most iconic collection remained that of paintings in the Grande Galerie, a number of other initiatives mushroomed in the vast building, named as if they were separate museums even though they were generally managed under the same administrative umbrella. Correspondingly, the museum complex was often referred to in the plural ("les musées du Louvre") rather than singular.
During the Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830), Louis XVIII and Charles X added to the collections. The Greek and Roman sculpture gallery on the ground floor of the southwestern side of the Cour Carrée was completed on designs by Percier and Fontaine. In 1819 an exhibition of manufactured products was opened in the first floor of the Cour Carrée's southern wing and would stay there until the mid-1820s. Charles X in 1826 created the Musée Égyptien and in 1827 included it in his broader Musée Charles X, a new section of the museum complex located in a suite of lavishly decorated rooms on the first floor of the South Wing of the Cour Carrée. The Egyptian collection, initially curated by Jean-François Champollion, formed the basis for what is now the Louvre's Department of Egyptian Antiquities. It was formed from the purchased collections of Edmé-Antoine Durand, Henry Salt and the second collection of Bernardino Drovetti (the first one having been purchased by Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia to form the core of the present Museo Egizio in Turin). The Restoration period also saw the opening in 1824 of the Galerie d'Angoulême, a section of largely French sculptures on the ground floor of the Northwestern side of the Cour Carrée, many of whose artefacts came from the Palace of Versailles and from Alexandre Lenoir's Musée des Monuments Français following its closure in 1816. Meanwhile, the French Navy created an exhibition of ship models in the Louvre in December 1827, initially named musée dauphin in honor of Dauphin Louis Antoine, building on an 18th-century initiative of Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau. This collection, renamed musée naval in 1833 and later to develop into the Musée national de la Marine, was initially located on the first floor of the Cour Carrée's North Wing, and in 1838 moved up one level to the 2nd-floor attic, where it remained for more than a century.
Following the July Revolution, King Louis Philippe focused his interest on the repurposing of the Palace of Versailles into a Museum of French History conceived as a project of national reconciliation, and the Louvre was kept in comparative neglect. Louis-Philippe did, however, sponsor the creation of the musée assyrien to host the monumental Assyrian sculpture works brought to Paris by Paul-Émile Botta, in the ground-floor gallery north of the eastern entrance of the Cour Carrée. The Assyrian Museum opened on 1 May 1847. Separately, Louis-Philippe had his Spanish gallery displayed in the Louvre from 7 January 1838, in five rooms on the first floor of the Cour Carrée's East (Colonnade) Wing, but the collection remained his personal property. As a consequence, the works were removed after Louis-Philippe was deposed in 1848, and were eventually auctioned away in 1853.
The short-lived Second Republic had more ambitions for the Louvre. It initiated repair work, the completion of the Galerie d'Apollon and of the salle des sept-cheminées, and the overhaul of the Salon Carré (former site of the iconic yearly Salon) and of the Grande Galerie. In 1848, the Naval Museum in the Cour Carrée's attic was brought under the common Louvre Museum management, a change which was again reversed in 1920. In 1850 under the leadership of curator Adrien de Longpérier, the musée mexicain opened within the Louvre as the first European museum dedicated to pre-Columbian art.
The rule of Napoleon III was transformational for the Louvre, both the building and the museum. In 1852, he created the Musée des Souverains in the Colonnade Wing, an ideological project aimed at buttressing his personal legitimacy. In 1861, he bought 11,835 artworks including 641 paintings, Greek gold and other antiquities of the Campana collection. For its display, he created another new section within the Louvre named Musée Napoléon III, occupying a number of rooms in various parts of the building. Between 1852 and 1870, the museum added 20,000 new artefacts to its collections.
The main change of that period was to the building itself. In the 1850s architects Louis Visconti and Hector Lefuel created massive new spaces around what is now called the Cour Napoléon, some of which (in the South Wing, now Aile Denon) went to the museum. In the 1860s, Lefuel also led the creation of the pavillon des Sessions with a new Salle des Etats closer to Napoleon III's residence in the Tuileries Palace, with the effect of shortening the Grande Galerie by about a third of its previous length. A smaller but significant Second Empire project was the decoration of the salle des Empereurs below the Salon carré.
The Louvre narrowly escaped serious damage during the suppression of the Paris Commune. On 23 May 1871, as the French Army advanced into Paris, a force of Communards led by Jules Bergeret set fire to the adjoining Tuileries Palace. The fire burned for forty-eight hours, entirely destroying the interior of the Tuileries and spreading to the north west wing of the museum next to it. The emperor's Louvre library (Bibliothèque du Louvre) and some of the adjoining halls, in what is now the Richelieu Wing, were separately destroyed. But the museum was saved by the efforts of Paris firemen and museum employees led by curator Henry Barbet de Jouy
Following the end of the monarchy, several spaces in the Louvre's South Wing went to the museum. The Salle du Manège was transferred to the museum in 1879, and in 1928 became its main entrance lobby. The large Salle des Etats that had been created by Lefuel between the Grande Galerie and Pavillon Denon was redecorated in 1886 by Edmond Guillaume, Lefuel's successor as architect of the Louvre, and opened as a spacious exhibition room. Edomond Guillaume also decorated the first-floor room at the northwest corner of the Cour Carrée, on the ceiling of which he placed in 1890 a monumental painting by Carolus-Duran, The Triumph of Marie de' Medici originally created in 1879 for the Luxembourg Palace.
Meanwhile, during the Third Republic (1870–1940) the Louvre acquired new artefacts mainly via donations, gifts, and sharing arrangements on excavations abroad. The 583-item Collection La Caze, donated in 1869 by Louis La Caze, included works by Chardin; Fragonard, Rembrandt and Watteau. In 1883, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which had been found in the Aegean Sea in 1863, was prominently displayed as the focal point of the Escalier Daru. Major artifacts excavated at Susa in Iran, including the massive Apadana capital and glazed brick decoration from the Palace of Darius there, accrued to the Oriental (Near Eastern) Antiquities Department in the 1880s. The Société des amis du Louvre was established in 1897 and donated prominent works, such as the Pietà of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. The expansion of the museum and its collections slowed after World War I, however, despite some prominent acquisitions such as Georges de La Tour's Saint Thomas and Baron Edmond de Rothschild's 1935 donation of 4,000 prints, 3,000 drawings, and 500 illustrated books.
From the late 19th century, the Louvre gradually veered away from its mid-century ambition of universality to become a more focused museum of French, Western and Near Eastern art, covering a space ranging from Iran to the Atlantic. The collections of the Louvre's musée mexicain were transferred to the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1887. As the Musée de Marine was increasingly constrained to display its core naval-themed collections in the limited space it had in the second-floor attic of the northern half of the Cour Carrée, many of its significant holdings of non-Western artefacts were transferred in 1905 to the Trocadéro ethnography museum, the National Antiquities Museum in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and the Chinese Museum in the Palace of Fontainebleau. The Musée de Marine itself was relocated to the Palais de Chaillot in 1943. The Louvre's extensive collections of Asian art were moved to the Guimet Museum in 1945. Nevertheless, the Louvre's first gallery of Islamic art opened in 1922.
In the late 1920s, Louvre Director Henri Verne devised a master plan for the rationalization of the museum's exhibitions, which was partly implemented in the following decade. In 1932–1934, Louvre architects Camille Lefèvre and Albert Ferran redesigned the Escalier Daru to its current appearance. The Cour du Sphinx in the South Wing was covered by a glass roof in 1934. Decorative arts exhibits were expanded in the first floor of the North Wing of the Cour Carrée, including some of France's first Period Room displays. In the late 1930s, The La Caze donation was moved to a remodeled Salle La Caze above the salle des Caryatides, with reduced height to create more rooms on the second floor and a sober interior design by Albert Ferran.
During World War II, the Louvre conducted an elaborate plan of evacuation of its art collection. When Germany occupied the Sudetenland, many important artworks such as the Mona Lisa were temporarily moved to the Château de Chambord. When war was formally declared a year later, most of the museum's paintings were sent there as well. Select sculptures such as Winged Victory of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo were sent to the Château de Valençay. On 27 August 1939, after two days of packing, truck convoys began to leave Paris. By 28 December, the museum was cleared of most works, except those that were too heavy and "unimportant paintings [that] were left in the basement". In early 1945, after the liberation of France, art began returning to the Louvre.
New arrangements after the war revealed the further evolution of taste away from the lavish decorative practices of the late 19th century. In 1947, Edmond Guillaume's ceiling ornaments were removed from the Salle des Etats, where the Mona Lisa was first displayed in 1966. Around 1950, Louvre architect Jean-Jacques Haffner streamlined the interior decoration of the Grande Galerie. In 1953, a new ceiling by Georges Braque was inaugurated in the Salle Henri II, next to the Salle La Caze. In the late 1960s, seats designed by Pierre Paulin were installed in the Grande Galerie. In 1972, the Salon Carré's museography was remade with lighting from a hung tubular case, designed by Louvre architect Marc Saltet with assistance from designers André Monpoix, Joseph-André Motte and Paulin.
In 1961, the Finance Ministry accepted to leave the Pavillon de Flore at the southwestern end of the Louvre building, as Verne had recommended in his 1920s plan. New exhibition spaces of sculptures (ground floor) and paintings (first floor) opened there later in the 1960s, on a design by government architect Olivier Lahalle.
In 1981, French President François Mitterrand proposed, as one of his Grands Projets, the Grand Louvre plan to relocate the Finance Ministry, until then housed in the North Wing of the Louvre, and thus devote almost the entire Louvre building (except its northwestern tip, which houses the separate Musée des Arts Décoratifs) to the museum which would be correspondingly restructured. In 1984 I. M. Pei, the architect personally selected by Mitterrand, proposed a master plan including an underground entrance space accessed through a glass pyramid in the Louvre's central Cour Napoléon.
The open spaces surrounding the pyramid were inaugurated on 15 October 1988, and its underground lobby was opened on 30 March 1989. New galleries of early modern French paintings on the 2nd floor of the Cour Carrée, for which the planning had started before the Grand Louvre, also opened in 1989. Further rooms in the same sequence, designed by Italo Rota, opened on 15 December 1992.
On 18 November 1993, Mitterrand inaugurated the next major phase of the Grand Louvre plan: the renovated North (Richelieu) Wing in the former Finance Ministry site, the museum's largest single expansion in its entire history, designed by Pei, his French associate Michel Macary, and Jean-Michel Wilmotte. Further underground spaces known as the Carrousel du Louvre, centered on the Inverted Pyramid and designed by Pei and Macary, had opened in October 1993. Other refurbished galleries, of Italian sculptures and Egyptian antiquities, opened in 1994. The third and last main phase of the plan unfolded mainly in 1997, with new renovated rooms in the Sully and Denon wings. A new entrance at the porte des Lions opened in 1998, leading on the first floor to new rooms of Spanish paintings.
As of 2002, the Louvre's visitor count had doubled from its pre-Grand-Louvre levels.
President Jacques Chirac, who had succeeded Mitterrand in 1995, insisted on the return of non-Western art to the Louvre, upon a recommendation from his friend the art collector and dealer Jacques Kerchache [fr]. On his initiative, a selection of highlights from the collections of what would become the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac was installed on the ground floor of the Pavillon des Sessions and opened in 2000, six years ahead of the Musée du Quai Branly itself.
The main other initiative in the aftermath of the Grand Louvre project was Chirac's decision to create a new department of Islamic Art, by executive order of 1 August 2003, and to move the corresponding collections from their prior underground location in the Richelieu Wing to a more prominent site in the Denon Wing. That new section opened on 22 September 2012, together with collections from the Roman-era Eastern Mediterranean, with financial support from the Al Waleed bin Talal Foundation and on a design by Mario Bellini and Rudy Ricciotti.
In 2010, American painter Cy Twombly completed a new ceiling for the Salle des Bronzes (the former Salle La Caze), a counterpoint to that of Braque installed in 1953 in the adjacent Salle Henri II. The room's floor and walls were redesigned in 2021 by Louvre architect Michel Goutal to revert the changes made by his predecessor Albert Ferran in the late 1930s, triggering protests from the Cy Twombly Foundation on grounds that the then-deceased painter's work had been created to fit with the room's prior decoration
On 6 June 2014, the Decorative Arts section on the first floor of the Cour Carrée's northern wing opened after comprehensive refurbishment.
The Louvre, like many other museums and galleries, felt the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the arts and cultural heritage. It was closed for six months during French coronavirus lockdowns and saw visitor numbers plunge to 2.7 million in 2020, from 9.6 million in 2019 and 10.2 million in 2018, which was a record year.
Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-990ER(WL) N492AS in the special UNCF - Education can change the World scheme si seen making a somewhat rare appearance on the south side of Chicago O'Hare just moments away from touching down on runway 10C as Alaska 1014 from Seattle Tacoma International.
Starting to update the sim for Spring.... Tricky wants me to change the whole sim... but isn't it pretty like this?? I want to enjoy it one more season!
Avanti West Coast Class 390 390121 "Opportunity" Woodacre on 1m15 1434 Glasgow Central -London Euston on 27/04/2023
Another shot of the amazing rolling hills and farmlands of the Palouse Region, as seen from Steptoe Butte. This place was simply spectacular and got better as the sun set lower in the sky, which then lead to the casting of shadows among the rolling hills. Always changing landscape; always equally impressive.
While standing there photographing the farmlands, I couldn't help but wonder what they would look like in the winter, or another season. So, I looked up images of those seasons as well. As expected, the terrain varied greatly with the seasons - ranging from lush green, to varied colors (depending on the crops), to brown (when harvest season is over), to snow covered. Wish I could visit there each season to document the same spot in the changing seasons.
While researching the area, I found a really cool fact about the area. It involves the Giant Palouse Earthworm, thought to be extinct, but has been documented in several sightings. These earthworms grew up to 3 feet in length in the past, but more current sightings weren't even 1/2 of that size. Their scientific name is Driloleirus, meaning "lily-like worm", after the lily scent that they were reported to have emitted. Super cool. We, of course, didn't see any (they are extremely rare), but I did have a hitchhiking tick on my face while there ... YIKES!
Happy Monday everyone!
Thanks for stopping by to view and for all of your thoughts and comments.
© Debbie Tubridy / © TNWA Photography - All of my images are protected by copyright and may not be used on any site, blog, or forum without my permission.
Website: www.tnwaphotography.com
ODC-What Is There To Be Afraid Of
I think this year more than ever we're seeing the devastating effects of Climate Change. I know the west coast is burning up and over here in the east we are inundated with excessive amounts of moisture and flooding! it's truly frightening how extreme the weather is becoming. climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
Notice: We have attempted to identify each mushroom correctly, please be aware that we are not experts. Please do not solely rely on this source for identification and determination of edibility.
Oh, how the light changes… it gave Monet his Haystack Series,
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haystacks_(Monet)
And never fails to delight and surprise me here, when least expected.
This photo was taken 5 minutes before 'Last light'..
Can you believe it…and one of the swans is just paddling into view..
Besides a little straighten up, no edits.
This is exactly what I was seeing.
Reminds me, well, it's almost the colours of our Australian flag of the indigenous.
aboriginalflag.com.au/history.html
Each colour has a symbolic meaning for them as a collective people.
Which brings me to this story, of when I was last here at the lake...
Almost this time last year, mid-August, 3 days after my mother's birthday, I took a few hours off and met up with a fellow poet and high school teacher, Robert, for lunch at the kiosk at the other end of the lake.
We chose this spot because there wouldn't be many people around during the week, and we could be as loud and animated as we like, reading each other our latest poems.
There was only one other table occupied at this outdoor café, an older lady and her male friend, and on second look, I realised it was Liz, whom I hadn't seen for years.
We used to swap my kinesiology for her Reiki, way back in the 90's...
She was having lunch with a fellow whom she'd met on holiday up at Wilpeena Pound, and he was passing through on his way back to Sydney.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilpena_Pound
(Thought this was a weird coincidence as the poem I'd planned to read gave mention and great respect to this place.)
They were both indigenous. (Also a coincidence, in regards to the poem..)
LIz recognised me too and we were both delighted to see each other, so I invited them over to sit and listen to my reading after we'd all finished eating.
The poem I'd intended to read to Robert now had a surprise bigger audience, and little did Liz and friend know that they were in for quite a surprise…
My poem was about rural life in the 1900's and onwards, as had been told to me, about how it was for the aboriginal peoples when us 'whities' moved in, just a bit further south of here, in western New South Wales.
It takes a final twist at the end, relating to the events surrounding my mother's birth on a sheep station, outside Tamworth, 1929.
Mum's mother had come down with influenza which rapidly became severe pneumonia. This brought on early labour, and she died giving birth to a tiny premature baby, who grew up to be my own mother.
This took place in the harshest part of the freezing cruel winter, that is well known to descend and sweep across the broad expansive Liverpool Plains, that has no protection against the icy gale force winds..
Mum's Aunty Ida was a full blood indigenous lady from the 'Kamillaroi' people, married to my white Great Uncle Bill.
As typical of the times, this was quite a bone of contention, quietly chewed upon by the rest of the family..
But amongst all the following grief and mêlée, she was the one who stepped forward to take this fragile premmy home, to raise her with her own half cast children after the death of her white sister-in-law.
Mum's own father, a butcher and book keeper for the Currabubulla Sheep Station was a drinking, gambling man who, in shock at the sudden death of his very capable wife, was ill equipped to run the house and care for 4 other children.
And so he let this new fragile baby go, thinking she was so weak, she wouldn't survive for long anyway ..
Two years had passed when he heard through the grapevine that little two year old Betty was actually blossoming with robust health, and from the urgings of his other children, now settled into coping without their deceased mother and two years older as well, quite looking forward to having their little sister rather than facing the ordeal of caring for a sickly newborn…well, he went and took her back from their aboriginal Aunty Ida..and brought her home.
My mother had grown up for her first two years, quite happily with this loving blended family.. who, of course, were left heartbroken, when discovering they'd been told a lie, and little Betty wasn't going to visit her real siblings, just for the day …and wouldn't be 'coming back tomorrow'…as promised...
In fact, Mum had to wait another 45 long years before I could find her half cast cousin, Una , to be reunited..
Her father justified it all with the excuse to the rest of his family that he'd heard that full blood Aunty was going on Walkabout soon and was going to take little Betty with her.
My poem concluded that without this wonderful aboriginal woman, my Great Aunty Ida, and her huge heart, my own mother had little chance of survival, and my immediate family that is a little twig of the whole ancestry tree may never have existed.
Well, all three of my audience sat transfixed at the social/anthroplolgical details I'd managed to write in rhyming, rhythmic, poetic verse.
While reading it aloud to my indigenous friends, at various points I became painfully aware of how close to the bone some of the subject matter was in their history of dismissive disregard from the white man, and I'd pause, almost to gasp for the next breath... should I skip the next bit? It's so raw!
But I'd glance up from the page at Liz, and see her sitting back with a grin from ear to ear, gently nodding with such huge satisfaction and appreciation that her people had just received a gift of precious, heartfelt validation of their struggles of recognition ever since 'civilised colonisation' began over 200 nears ago.
Lets just say it surpassed a certain flaky, belated "Sorry…" message from the govt about 7 years ago.
I won't risk my "Safe" category by saying the more earthier Aussie version of that..
Gosh though, I'm still glad I'd already cut three of the most graphic chapters out of it…
The poem begins with a tribute to Eddie Mabo, tireless campaigner for indigenous rights, then there's about ten pages of a collection of stories told to me first hand from various people over the years, entwined together to paint the bigger picture, concluding with my mother's rocky beginning in life and how she was given a second chance at this life by an indigenous angel..
There's more to the story of this day, to be continued another time perhaps…but for now I'll finish by telling you that during one chapter I had to stop reading completely and break down into sobs.
I was in such a state of overwhelm, it had hit me that it was such a privilege to be able to read it to an indigenous audience and they absolutely loved it.
Yes, I had written it, but it was only then that I really started to feel the depth of it..
Meanwhile, poor Robert, my straight-laced, conservative, whiter-than-white teacher friend sat at the end of the table gobsmacked-speechless with awe throughout the whole proceedings, and totally forgotten, due to all the interaction between the rest of us..
But hey ~ Phew! ~ What a day...
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I like experimenting with AI to transform vintage advertising graphics in various ways.
AI does not always follow instructions, which can produce surprising results. That is what happened here. I asked it to turn the illustrations of people in a 1966 men's clothing ad into photographs of real people.
It obliged, only with twist that brought Fathers' Day up to date. As part of a two-dad family, I was tickled by the mistake.
See whether you can spot the difference. Well, it got the big polka dots right.
We've have some happy little changes implemented in recent weeks - some small improvements that have made a big difference. We are now at the end of our commissions (You're in for some Spam this weekend!) and we want to move forward in a positive direction.
Although some of these are gradual improvements over the course of a couple of months, here is a list of little improvements we have made.
✮ Improved Packaging - The wigs are now arriving much better than previously. They will still need brushing once removed from their boxes, but the fibres are remaining as they should do during transit. We've had enough testing to confirm that the new packaging is working out wonderfully.~
✮ Sturdier Cap - The caps are made with a different material and in a different method with an additional "sideburn" area on some styles to add extra length around the face~
✮ Thicker, Fuller wigs.
✮ A set shipping schedule. We ship every Saturday or worst case scenario, the following Monday.
C H A N G E S T O C O M E
✮ Rebranding - We will be changing our name before the launch of the winter sale. With so many positive improvements we'd like to go into the new year with an equally positive mindset. We aren't the wig shop we were when we started this a year ago and we have grown and learned so many things. We want to come back anew with a name that really reflects us rather than continue on as Frappzilla, which was first and foremost a personal username that was never really meant for the both of us. We'll have a fresh new image and even some new models so we can show you guys our designs to their full potential.
✮ New Store - One of the most exciting things to come in the next week or two is the new and improved webshop which I have mentioned in recent posts. The new store will feature your own personal login area, automated (at last) shipping notifications and a lot of other exciting features.
✮ Monthly Newsletter - Something that we wanted to bring to you in 2015 will finally be coming at the start of the new year, thanks to the new store.
✮ New Styles - With the new models comes a new approach with our premium line, featuring more realistic designs, hairlines and parts. We anticipate a heavy focus on shorter cuts alongside the current kinds of wigs we offer. We'll also have some fun and quirky additions that you won't have seen anywhere before and we'lll finally launch our line of dreadlocks wigs too.
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The last commission photos will be sent out over the weekend and everything that has been confirmed by the customer will be shipped on Monday.
A friendly reminder that our winter sale starts on November 25th with daily pre-made wigs at a discount, available in the new webshop. Don't forget our bonus Advent Calendar starting on the 1st December with a huge daily discount on one wig per day up until Christmas Eve.
We want to thank all of you for your continued support. Thank you so so much for everything, always!
[explore #410 on 26.03.09]
time to change.. the buddy icon :P
well, I also should dye my hair 'cause I look blond for an half and dark for the other half actually, but never mind -.-"
hooray for batroom mirror's shots u.u
tempo di cambiare.. la buddy icon :P
vabbè, mi dovessi anche fare una tintura, che sono mezza bionda e mezza bruna, ma pazienza -.-"
ah, e poi sì, mi faccio le foto allo specchio nel gabinetto, perchè le gabinette si autoritraggono nel gabinetto (non fa una piega, no? u.u)
published on the online magazine fringe indie, on february-march 2010.
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011 :: 365 :: 11th January 2013
This is one of those things that you can push an object through is and it will make the shape, for the life of me I don't know what it is called, hope all you smart people out there can tell me.
Originally I had posted a bw mono version of this but changed my mind and it is now pink mono :)
Often providing great opportunities for photos shift changes on some coal mining operations were exciting places to be. This was Nancheng in Jixi and an Sy is being serviced in the pollution/gloom..
This morning instead of Birmingham Airport to Gatwick it was the Hilton Hotel NEC to Gatwick .Parked outside the hotel at 07.30 this morning was Canvendish YN13BXD an Irizar I6 C53FT. Photo taken 13/10/16
This is the first tree I have seen so far with all, or nearly all, of its leaves changed. Taken on a very damp morning using a Nikon D5100 with Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 lens.
Back to Emerald Island . Fishing boats facing incoming tide filling shallow bay. Cloudy , quite Sunday morning in Clonakilty. I would like to invite you to take a look at more of the images from Ireland www.flickr.com/photos/januszbc/sets/72157605222175919/
Happy 4th of July to our friends in USA
See where this picture was taken - Ring [?]
Explore July 4th 2008 #489
Ch Ch Changes!!!
I hated the brown, It made that green look even more garish to me sooo I repainted the table and shelves white and I decided to just make the shelving evenly spaced and have them completey wrap around the corner rather than that break in the middle. It looks a lot more cohesive to me now but now my back hurts! LOL