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Gallery: more street art from Sofia
It’s no secret that I am a big fan of street art. I don’t mean scrawled graffiti, or even more precisely worked ‘tags’. I mean art. Like many cities today, Sofia offers a dedicated street art tour; we saw signs advertising it in several places. But we chose not to take the tour, instead preferring to seek out street art at our own pace.
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Gallery: yet more street art in Paris
I never tire of wandering the streets of Paris; there is always so much to see and to photograph. From elegant buildings to quirky details and of course plenty of street art.
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Gallery: a street artist at work in Paris
We only occasionally get the chance to watch a street artist at work. Somehow these works of art seem to appear almost magically on our streets, created perhaps overnight while we sleep? Some of course take many hours, even days, to complete. But others are much simpler and while they may have less impact still brighten our day.
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Radical Horizons: the Art of Burning Man at Chatsworth
Burning Man is a unique event that takes place every year in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, USA. But we are not in the deserts of Nevada; we are among the green hills of England’s Peak District.
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Gallery: on the trail of Knaresborough’s Town Windows
How many windows is too many? That was the question facing many seventeenth century property owners. In 1696 a window tax was introduced in England and Wales. The more windows a building had, the more its owner had to pay.
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Gallery: art comes in threes
For my next set of Thursday Trios I am focusing on art. I’ve borrowed a quote from Camus, a French author and philosopher, an absurdist and existentialist. I've also arguably borrowed a certain sense of the absurd for this gallery, but I don’t claim it to be philosophical in any sense!
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Gallery: on the streets of Vienna
Vienna must be one of the most elegant cities in Europe. Its small scale gives it an air of intimacy that contrasts with the grandeur of many of its buildings. That’s an appealing combination.
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Introduction to some monuments in Riga
Riga was a city in which I quickly felt very comfortable. It has a compact old town with plenty to see but not too ‘aspic-like’; by which I mean that it felt both touristy and homely at the same time, somewhere I could imagine that the locals don’t feel too overwhelmed by the history and the visiting population. It is also a city of monuments.
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The Conversation Piece and the Eye
Some sculptures are all the better for being in just the right place; think of the Angel of the North or Statue of Liberty, for example. And in its own less dramatic way that is true of the Conversation Piece in South Shields.
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Gallery: Cape Verde street art
Most people visit Cape Verde for the classic three Ss: sun, sea and sand. We came mainly for the first of these, in search of some February warmth. In truth it wasn’t as warm as we’d hoped, so maybe it was a good thing we had relatively little interest in the other two.