Halldor Sigurdsson Sculpture Gets Unveiled
Last year I completed a portrait commission for some people in Iceland. The commission was originally organised through John Robinson who I know from the Liver Sketch Club who also very kindly helped organise around the various problems encountered along the way. Not having dealt with bronze casting or shipping large objects to foreign countries before the process was something of an involved one but it got it over there eventually. Then world events took a bad turn, Iceland's economy got hit really bad by the recession and the people I was working for had more important things to do than deal with a sculpture which a far a I knew had been in storage ever since. Then this weekend the I got a photo through of the unveiling via John. Here it is.
The person doing the unveiling is the daughter of Halldor Sigurdsson of whom this is a portrait. It was done from photographic reference so I can only hope its a good likeness for people who actually knew him. The feedback I've got seems pretty positive though. Its possible that I might get some more photos through later in which case I'll post them here.
Studying in Florence
New year and a new semester starts in my course in Florence. I've been going through my camera of stuff from the previous semester. Here are some of the things I've been doing. I'm going to leave out the simple exercises and getting up to speed stuff just a selection of what I think is the good stuff.
In which I do that tourist thing
This weekend my roommates and I headed up to Piazza Michelangelo to do some drawing of the city from above. Piazza Michelangelo contains a big copy of the David cast in bronze. Not bad at all and better than the marble copy in the Piazza Signoria but still not a patch on the original. Fortunately that is not the only attraction. It has superbs views of Florence from above located, as it is on a prominance on the West side of the Arno.
We got there, eventually towards lunchtime after a few digressions to purchase art materials etc.. Unfortunately they were relying on me to do map reading and my map, while perfectly servicable 6 weeks ago when we first got here is now rapidly disintegrating. Navigation has become one part actual map-reading, one part jigsaw solving.
Drawing in Florence
As well as doing my course I occasionally get a chance to head into the various museums in Florence and do a bit of drawing. Here are two: one from the Academia of a Michelangelo unfinished captive, and one from la Specola quite possibly the creepiest museum in Florence with a large collection of anatomical waxes of which this is one
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New Site
Its been a little while since I put my site together out of pure HTML CSS which I was really proud of at the time. Now its looking a bit seen into. So after quite a while of threatening that I was going to change my site round and give it with a nice slick new Wordpress based look here is the new site. Sort of. At the moment everything is vanilla standard Wordpress theme. By the time you read this it is possible things have got better. We'll see.