Visiting the Art Museum

Yesterday I decided to visit the Art Museum. The distance is probably about the same for me as to the Textile Museum (about ½ hour walk), but it feels longer (partly perhaps because the last bit is uphill...) The museum is located in the same building as our town library and theatre; and since they changed the bus lines (not much use to me now), I've rarely been there.

 Our "Culture Center" - Art Museum, Library, Theatre (and a café).

The main entrance; across a square from this church (the largest in town, from ~1900):

The sculpture outside the church is one of the works included in the Art Biennial.

I went inside for a short touristy visit (although I've been there many times before).

Have to say that most of the current exhibitions within the Art Museum were of the kind I find it rather hard to relate to. My brochure tells me that the artist behind the video installation above is Hicham Berrada, from France, and the title is Présage (Omen) - set in "an aquatic world" with a "mineral flora" of "chemical substances reacting to an electric current in the water". ("Is this what it might have looked like at the beginnng of time, an event spanning millions of years?")

This (above), also a video installation, may have been by the same artist, but I'm not sure. The theme seemed very similar, anyway. (Creation, beginning of time, whatever...)

This (above) made even less "sense" to me. There was a long row of photos of hour glasses on the opposite wall though, so probably still something to do with time (?)

In one room they were showing various portraits from the museum's collections. The only ones I can say I was really interested to see again were some exquisite 18th century miniature portraits by Peter Adolf Hall - born 1739 in Borås, and died 1793 in Liège, France. They used to be in a separate exhibition in a room of their own, but that was changed a number of years ago. So I've seen them before, but not recently.

I included my own hand in one of the photos , just to give you an idea of the size of them.

I do also quite like this little figurine of a woman vacuuming. (To compare with classic ballerinas and shepardesses or whatnot...) I remember this one from some earlier exhibition as well. ("Live as usual" by Gittan Jönsson, 2009)

Walking back downtown from the art museum, I went through an underpass that has been getting a new mural in connection with this year's art biennial. It turned out to consist of a number of separate panels rather than being painted directly on the wall, though. Won't end up on my list of favourites - but of course a big improvment on grey concrete and random amateur graffiti, which is usually all that most such places have to offer...!

Skärhamn / Nordic Water Colour Museum

On Wednesday morning, 9 August (not too early), we set off on our two days trip to the west coast. Basically we had a choice of two roads to get from here to where we wanted to go. To avoid going into Gothenburg (2nd largest city in Sweden), P decided on the upper, slightly longer route via Alingsås, which would take us via the northern outskirts. Turned out a wise choice, also because of the heavy rain flooding some places in the southern parts of Gbg. (When we reached the E6 motorway along the coast, we met a long queue standing still in the other direction, towards the city...)

 I think this is probably from where we joined the motorway... (12:12)

(12:48) Crossing the bridge over to the island Tjörn.

 Half an hour later, we had arrived at our first destination, Skärhamn, and Nordiska Akvarellmuseet (The Nordic Watercolour Museum). Because of rain and wind and umbrellas and whatnot, I seem to have missed getting a photo of my own of the building from the outside. But here is one I 'snipped' from their website:

We were hungry by then, so started our visit by having lunch in their restaurant. It was rather full but luckily we did not have to wait too long to get a table.

We both chose "fish and chips". They also had "child's portion" of this dish on the menu (at a lower price) and I was bold enough to ask if I could have that even though I was clearly not a child... (The thing is, I hardly ever manage to finish a full "normal" restaurant portion of anything, so always end up leaving a lot on the plate when eating out.) I could, and the small portion was certainly big enough for me, even though it was delicious!

Having finished our lunch, we were ready for our tour of the museum. I have to confess I was a little bit disappointed with it, as I had expected them to also have a permanent exhibition of what the name suggests - i.e. works by Nordic water colour artists. Turned out that they constantly change their exhibitions though, and not all that much of what was on display just now was typical water colour paintings. (Had I studied their website more carefully beforehand, I would have known that, but when planning the trip I mainly just checked opening hours etc.) Worth a visit anyway of course - even if it did not quite live up to all my expectations...

Their exhibition this summer is called Animal Kingdom, and the first room we entered had this impressive installation of a gazillion brown butterflies...

They also had on display 18th century botany books with drawings/water colours of plants by the famous Swedish botanist Carl von Linné (Linnaeus in Latin) (and maybe some others as well).

Systema Naturae is one of the major works of the Swedish botanist, zoologist and physician Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) and introduced the Linnaean taxonomy. (Link to Wikipedia article.)

 

Walton Ford, La Madre, 2017

In one room there were some really huge paintings (I doubt they were water colour). The one above was the one that I liked the best. It was hard to snap photos as the museum was crowded and there were lots of people everywhere all the time.  

Another room was filled with weird-looking sculptures. The room was dark with the light (spotlights) shifting all the time. Below is the only shot I managed:

It was still rainy and windy outside when we got out of the museum. I managed a few more photos of the marina on our way back to the car, though. (15:05)

 

Linking to

 

Make Believe

(Meme copied from Facebook)

"I need a day between every day to
recover from the day before and
prepare for the upcoming day."  

And that, of course, becomes even more true with an unusually intense week behind me...

For me it was only 2 days + 1 night away from home; but altogether I had ~ 4 days with my brother (three whole days + two half days). And I took lots of photos. So I'm going to take my time blogging about it.

P drove down here from Karlstad on Monday afternoon (7 Aug) and arrived towards evening. (For him a journey of around 300 km/185 miles.) Because of the weather (very rainy) we had decided not to set off for the coast until Wednesday (which might give us at least one sunny day on Thursday). So on Tuesday we had a fairly relaxed day with lunch at home, and in the afternoon just went for a short trip by car across town to the Abecita Art Museum (click if you want to know more about it) to see their current photo art exhibitons. The museum is spread over three large floors, and with five different current exhibitions (+ some permanent works from their own collection) we spent quite a while there.

The  exhibiton that I liked best was 'Make Believe' by photographer Erik Johansson. (Link to his own website.)

Some of his works fitted the rainy weather very well... ;)

And the one below made me think of Ginny of the blog Let Your Light Shine and her many wonderful photos of the Moon... ;)  (I cropped this image a little to get rid of some disturbing reflections in my own photo.)

 

 

 Looking out from a window at the Abecita Art Museum towards the shopping centre nearby.

We had coffee/tea in the museum café before we left; and before we went back home we also stopped at one of the nearby shopping malls, where I managed to find a pair of rubber boots. (Or 'wellingtons' or 'rain boots' or whatever - tell me your preferred name for them in the comments, if you like!) 

I had searched a couple of shoe shops in the city centre the week before without finding any in my size (not really surprising, after a whole month of rain!!) - but now at last found a pair that fit me, in a sport shop. Living in town, I've been managing without any for years - but realized that at least for one of our planned adventures, I'd probably really need them... 

The rest of the day was spent packing (for me), planning for the trip, and general "catching up talk".

 

(PS. Speaking of catching up... In case someone is wondering, I have been reading/ catching up with more blog posts by my online friends than I've commented on.)

Women's Rights

Continued from my Library post

In the foyer of the Cultural Centre, there is an exhibition celebrating democracy and 100 years since women acquired the right to vote in national elections here in Sweden: 1921. 

Looking up some details now, I see that the "age of majority" back then was 23, though (nowadays 18). Which means neither of my grandmothers (born 1900 and 1902) would have been old enough to vote in that historic election. (And as a matter of fact, neither of my grandfathers either!)

As I was in the building anyway, I also took the opportunity to re-visit the Art Museum. With the suffragette movement still on my mind, one of the sculptures that caught my camera eye this time, was this one:

And seen from the back...

From one of the windows on the ground floor, one has this view towards the nearby church (built around 1906 if memory serves me right). That church is part of this summer's art exhibitions too, and I went over to check in there again as well. The modern art on display there consists a number  of see-through screens with "floating clouds" in various colours. They seemed to have multiplied since last time! But it was probably just me walking around more this time - and changing perspective (= looking up more than I did then) ;)

Back at the Cultural Centre, I then sat down for a while at the café and had an ice cream to recharge my batteries for the walk back home. Having done that, I even felt refreshed enough for another little detour ... (to be continued...)