Category: Travel

Postcard from London, England: ‘Strange bedfellows’ for eternity

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Above left: Monumental effigy of Mary Queen of Scots (1542-1587). Above right: Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603). Lady Chapel, Westminster Abbey

There is no other shelter hereabouts: misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.” 

The Tempest, William Shakespeare, 1611

In recent years, you’ve been exposed to an immense quantity of footage showing the interior of Westminster Abbey: the wedding of Prince and Princess of Wales in 2011; the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022); and the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla in 2023.

With no need to cover that aspect, this taphophile is jumping straight to the everyday role of Westminster – a splendid monumental cemetery housing the remains of more than 3,300 elite, a veritable who’s-who of a thousand years of British history. Grave markers underfoot lie ignored, overwhelmed by the sculptural and polychrome effigies and memorials climbing ever higher up the church walls.

If ghosts rise in the night, what bedlam must reign. According to the Westminster website, the remains of 13 kings, four queens regnant, 11 queens consort, and two more queens are interred there. Blood might run thicker than water, yet British bluebloods frequently spilled that of their kin.

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Postcard from Bilbao, Spain: Art scarcely has a chance to shine

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Above: Detail of “Tall Tree and the Big Eye,” Anish Kapoor

Guggenheim Bilbao has turned 25. While 25 years is but a small blip on my age chart, I feared it might prove too long to wait to visit architect Frank Gehry‘s monumental project. People described it as a ship, a giant flower, a fish with shimmering titanium scales. Would it simply seem dated, as much contemporary architecture does after a decade?

My answer is no! It’s a massive, awe-inspiring, sculpture – its scale rendering it overwhelming both inside and out. The deconstructive shapes seem not unlike the Pablo Picasso sculptures of women featured in a major exhibition while we were there. Or Richard Serra’s curvilinear weathered-steel sculpture, “A Matter of Time,” drawing people inside like a giant human mousetrap.

Even spectacular, large-scale artworks encounter difficulties asserting themselves inside the soaring sensuous interior. This is a building one would pay to explore even if there were no art inside.

Maybe that should not be a conflict up for debate. So often architecture is dumbed down by budget, with function superseding inspirational design.

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Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: Richness of contemporary art scene evident at MUPO

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Above: Detail of “Aborregados 6” by Soledad Velasco

The works with acrylic and India ink are a mixture that balances the safe and the unsure, the spontaneity and the calculated. While acrylic is more stable and gives solidity to the work, the pen and water give that feeling of chance, of an accident that must be controlled…. The immediacy and freshness, the lack of control when one decides to drain the water and the necessary control that ends up being exercised, all of this is a metaphor for what each day has in store for us. And in my case, a reminder that nothing is entirely predictable or certain.”

Soledad Velasco

Originally hailing from Oaxaca, artist Soledad Velasco spent 25 years working in Spain before returning home in 2019. Earlier this year, we saw the fruit of her time spent since then in a one-person show, “A Eva,” at Museo de los Pintores Oaxaquenos, or MUPO.

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