The first day in marseille was really great, we got to walk around the port and surrounding streets + go see a lot of surrealist drawings and paintings in musée cantini. I was shocked by how incredibly PRETTY marseille is. The sun just shines in a different way there. Especially with the classic beige colored buildings, everything looked golden. the golden touch… and the trees! they are the strangest things. some of the swooping shapes I saw reminded me of the trees in paul nash drawings. but the knobby ones you see all over the streets, they're so odd and beautiful. I realised I've been appreciating trees more lately, they come in so so many incredible forms. I was thinking this as I was looking out the window (in the ken kiff trip as well), that 'nature is still' but it isn't really, it's always growing and swaying in the wind. but to us, it looks still in the moment. we're so used to so much NOISE and MOVEMENT around us in the city. sometimes you just need a little stillness.
Those surrealist drawings were really curious too, as in I was curious about them when I heard we were going there on the first day, but also the works themselves were very alive and strange. Some definitely stood out more than others, for example the drawing with that mix of human ? plant ? animal ? which made me think back to the tartary lamb and the ideas of morphing again. Also, everything was in french but I tried hard to recall my knowledge in (5) years of french learning back in high school (forgot everything, you really have to live in a place and be immersed to learn the language properly) and I’m realising that this exhibition related greatly to what I was speaking about at the british museum workshop. Ideas of Surrealism, Automatism, familiar names like breton came up as well. It’s definitely an area I’m very interested in, although I’m not sure how my work right now fits in with it. I’m thinking about what I should focus on in the unit 8 essay. Anyway, the first day was lovely, the air was incredibly fresh.
