Today we all went to Kew Gardens to see a botanical art show and some crazy plants. I think the majority of us were most excited to see Regina excited about something we know she is so passionate about. It was inspiring to hear her talk about how botanical art requires a perfect harmony between art, science, observation, and a good eye. I think graphic design is very similar in the way that it is a marriage of so many different types of information working together to create a great visual and function piece. I broke off into a group of four for part of the day which made exploring so much more manageable and enjoyable.

We finished at Kew Gardens in the afternoon and Sarah and I went on to explore Oxford Street including… wait for it… THE BIGGEST LUSH IN THE WORLD! I have never been so excited to be in a store in my entire life. I love and use Lush products in the US but the experience of a three floor, spa/ shop/ hangout, filled with helpful and friendly employees, was just like being at Disney (without the lines or crying children). I was physically jumping for joy while shopping for bath bombs and bubble bars to bring home and enjoy! It’s really the little things that excite me!

Remember Disney’s 1964 feature Mary Poppins starring Julie Andrews? (It’s set here in London! ?) Picture that scene, the one where they come across a line of sidewalk art and hop right in. If it’s been a while, or you haven’t seen the film, wandering through the Victoria and Albert Museum is more or less the real-life equivalent. Only, rather than dancing penguins and chalk trees, it’s as though you’ve stepped directly into the pages of all your art history textbooks. I think one of us passed by at least one work or copy we’d seen pictures of before—and many people got to look at different parts of the museum entirely. The British Museum was a little like this, but overwhelming in scale. The V&A’s size and organization make it easy to stroll around and focus simply on absorbing the awesome, awesome work. 

My best friend is a seamstress, so I was sure to take my time and nerd out properly over the Balenciaga fashion exhibit in her place. But afterwards, I knew exactly what I wanted to see first. I’d been particularly excited to see the Rodin sculptures. He and contemporary Degas are two of my favorite artists of all time, and it’s hard to find enough information about work online and in most books unless its one of the pieces with its own Wikipedia entry, like The Thinker or The Gates of Hell. 
I definitely prefer quantity over notoriety when it comes to seeing other artists’ work, because process is infinitely interesting to me; the more material to learn from, the better. Most people would agree, I think. It’s the same reason seeing a notable artist’s sketchbook is so cool. Anyway, checking out those works in person, I realized a photo wouldn’t have done it justice anyway: one could feel the turbulent energy in the shape and movement of each form just walking around it. Some of my favorite pieces were the ones I knew not to even bother photographing, because the memory alone would be more valuable as reference than a flattened imitaton. I also visited a couple original and cast/repro versions of classics we recognized with a friend, and nearly passed out in excitement at the Raphael Cartoons room. It’s always cool getting to see any original work in person for the opportunity to check out marks and surface texture more intimately, and learn a little history from the placards, but in the case of these drawings, the sheer scale commanded an atmosphere of total attention. While I’m not a religious person myself, I could almost understand how perfectly these works might inspire awe and wonder of magic forces beyond normal human understanding. I pictured devotees kneeling to pray and seeing these illustrations surrounding them, stretching far, far into the sky towards their heaven. 

The Natural History Museum afterwards was cool, too, but my favorite part of the afternoon was getting a little bit lost on the way out. We had to walk a ways to find a train station, and it seemed like on every block, we passed more neat architecture and interesting type. Everybody in the group found themselves pausing to take a photo almost as much as actually walking. It was nice, and a peaceful transition to the latter part of the day. We grabbed a quick, quiet lunch before regrouping to check out our next stop. This morning, above all the other visits, really put me in the mood to exercise more fine art muscles again. Since I’m so engrossed in design, and school gives us so much challenging and interesting coursework, I don’t paint as often as I used to, and certainly haven’t worked in sculpture since foundational classes. Now I really want to get more hands-on! I’ve heard more than a few classmates express similar thoughts and inspiration this week. It’s nice to know we aren’t alone in that.

The whole time I was at the Kew Gardens, I was just thinking of how much my mom would be able to stay the whole day walking around and taking pictures. She loves observing different floras and would always get giddy and excited seeing new and pretty ones.

The botanical art museum has a lot of botanical paintings from all around the world, and more interestingly, Indonesia. I needed to take a moment to sit down in the botanical art museum when I looked at the titan arum watercolor painting. The life-sized painting was really beautiful and even though it’s one of those weird, monstrous carnivorous plants, I appreciate the beauty of it.

The next time I visit the gardens, I would like to have a picnic here under the shade by the rose gardens — eating sandwiches, feeling the nice spring breeze, and enjoy the view and scent of the roses.

Today we went to visit the Kew Garden. The Kew is definitely the largest garden I have experienced in my entire life. While at the Kew I realized they have terrible wayfinding, and thus found inspiration for my wayfinding project for my study abroad trip.

The Kew had many different types of flowers, trees, and other various plants. However my favorite part of the Kew was the rose garden. I have always found myself to be interested in things that pertain to Alice in Wonderland, so experiencing the rose garden made me feel as if I was experiencing Alice’s journey. The Kew also had a tree top walkway, which brings guests high up among the trees. This made me feel like Alice yet again, because in her journey she eats a mushroom that increases her size/height astronomically. Over all the Kew was beautiful to experience and I was extremely happy to have some nice weather to experience it.

Let’s set something straight: I don’t love cars. I’ve never loved cars. My ex and my brothers always irritated me beyond reason with their talk of Bugatis, horsepower, and million-dollar price tags. To me, a V8 is a nasty veggie juice and not an engine, and my used 2003 Toyota works perfectly fine even though it can’t hit 200 mph and has crank windows.

But today, I treated myself to cars… and not just any cars:

007 cars.

Aston Martin V12 Vantage “invisibility car” used in Die Another Day (featuring Pierce Brosnan as James Bond).

I was never a huge Bond fan growing up, but I’ve warmed up to the series in recent years. My father was always a huge Bond fanatic and we watch VHSs to this day.

When I was trying to decide what to get my dad as a souvenir, I searched Google for a Bond museum or shop. Lo and behold – the London Film Museum was showing “Bond in Motion,” an exhibit featuring the authentic 007 vehicles from the franchise’s past 50 years.

When I had asked one of my brothers what he wanted as a souvenir, he sarcastically asked for an Aston Martin.

This exhibit was essentially killing two birds with one stone – bring home a gift for my dad, and make my brother insanely jealous that I, a car “hater,” would have the audacity to stand next to a fleet of Aston Martins featured in some of his favorite films. (I don’t even know if 500 horsepower is a thing, but it makes my title sound cool!) (If he reads that, he will probably rip his hair out.)

And that, my friends, is vengeance.

P.S. I got him his Aston Martin, but I don’t think it’s quite the scale he was implying.

Today I spent five hours at the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens. Five. Hours.  Exploring almost, if not all of the grounds. Starting in the Palm House Parterre which must’ve been at least 80 degrees and extremely humid for all of the plants which require that type of climate. It was interesting the way they positioned all of them, categorized by the country they originate from. The house was filled with life, literally to the brim! From the outside you could see leaves pressing against all of the windows high, high up in the building. There was a plant that if you ran your finger along it, all of it’s leaves closed up as if it was scared/hiding! I’ve never seen anything like that before.

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Making our way over to the Woodland area we took an elevator to the Treetop walkway. It was a little scary but good thing I’m short, the railing was almost as tall as me which helped with my minor fear of heights. Discovering a manmade log path was one of my favorite parts of the whole garden! The logs had stairs carved into them along with foot holes and even the type of tree they were. A long line of them created a path which made it so fun to jump from log to log.

Through the redwood forests… Please tell me you sang that in your head like I did ALL day after I spotted them. Well, anyways, if you’ve never seen redwood trees, they’re GIANT and beautiful.

Regina also talked about her process when it comes to her botanical artwork which was so interesting because as a graphic design professor we don’t often hear her talk about that topic much. She inspired me to get back into painting a little, by saying that becoming a graphic designer and focusing on the details (i.e. kerning and space around the letter) made her a better illustrator and painter in the long run.

The rest of the day myself along with a few friends explored the Covent Garden area where we watched many street performers who always mange to get a few dollars from me! Always helping out the starving artists ;). Tomorrow is the Hackathon, which after a conference call with a representative this morning, I am feeling much better about. It should be fun, and creatively inspiring!!

To end the blog, here are a few of my favorite pictures from today:

My body, wracked in agony and allergies, was ill-prepared for any further excursions today; after a solid 12 hours of sleep I thought, perhaps, my body might refresh itself and revert to it’s proper, youthful spryness.

I was wrong.

Very wrong.

It made the trip to the Kew Gardens very short for me, but after days of rushing here and there and being immersed in a bustling – but rather quiet, compared to Boston, or New York – city, being out in the slower, more subdued countryside was a blessing. The city (or perhaps town?) of Kew was beautiful, bearing an ancient charm that, while prevalent in much of London, is missing entirely in America. Not charm, per say, or quaintness – we have that at home, but it’s of a very different sort. American charm has it’s own vernacular of visual language that lacks that moss-coated stones and ivy-wrapped gates of Kew.

For a bit, I broke off from the rest of the groups to wander through the rose garden, seeking a tiny slice of solitude; not for any dislike of my peers, but because after a week of stressing my boundaries and making an effort to be social in spite of my introverted nature, I needed the time to be alone. It was a refreshing amount of time – thirty minutes, at the most, kneeling among the roses and watching children flomp themselves on to the grass and chase the birds – and had my hips not been those of an eighty-year-old-woman, I might have rejoined the others to go out shopping. Alas, both my hips – and my bank account – hurt too bad to go on, and rather than be a sour grape chugging along at the caboose end of the group, I headed back to the hotel to put my feet up and spend the rest of the night just relaxing.

For a home-body like me, this trip has been exciting, but taxing. I’m by no means at the point of misery and desiring to be home – not even a bit, in fact, I dread going back to the states – but I’ve reached the point where the pain from constant activity has been enough of a stress to make any further sight-seeing unenjoyable. I’m so, so, so happy I fit in so much in the first few days, and that I went with groups of students who didn’t put off seeing the city until the last couple of days. While it might mean that these last few days in London are spent in the hotel room immediately following our activities, I’m not unhappy with that being the reality; in fact, I’m quite ready to relax and enjoy the amenities of the Apex of London hotel. After all, it’s pretty damn posh.

When starting today’s day, it went off a little differently than usual. We all were gathered into the conference room that the hotel and were able to gain a conference call with one of the people that work with the Hackathon that we will doing for the next two days. After this meeting, I have become even more excited about this event and can’t wait to see what will come of it. After getting the details about what the Hackathon will bring us, it was time to relax a little bit before our journey for the day. Once we got our things together, it was time to head to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew Gardens. I wasn’t sure on what to expect from this trip because I had never heard of this place before, but once I had arrived I could understand why this place is very popular. We were able to get to the gardens from the Underground, which had a stop that was a short walk from the gardens. Once scanning our tickets, we started to walk toward the beginning of the garden and found a giant greenhouse that was the home to many plants. It was really hot in the greenhouse where it fogged up my camera lens. There were two floors to this greenhouse, which I thought was amazing since I have never seen a two floor greenhouse before. Actually, the size of this greenhouse was the size of a two story house. Once leaving the greenhouse, is when I saw the craziest view I have ever seen in my life. I saw wide open grass that stretched for miles and seemed like it would never end. A large rose garden on either end of this never ending field. It was a beautiful view and a view that I probably will not be able to see again for a long time. After seeing this amazing view of the land, we went onto find a gallery inside the garden. I wasn’t expecting to see a gallery, but I was happy that I would be able to see what was inside.

When going into the gallery, I could see that there was nothing but botanical art. This was very fascinating to me because I haven’t seen too much of this type of art and it fascinates me on how detailed all of the paintings had come out. When looking at all of these botanical art pieces, all I could think about was my professor’s pieces of botanical art that she had brought on this trip. Before this trip, I had no idea on how talented she was on painting life-like images of plants. Once I was done walking through the gallery, it was time to get a lesson on how to draw botanical art from non other than my professor Regina Milan, who is a fantastic botanical artist. She taught us the key things about how to draw plant life. She told us things such as how in a gallery show, there are 4 judges, where two are artists and two botanists. This allows for a judgment on the artistic evaluation of the pieces as well as a judgment on the accuracy of the piece. This all new information that I believe I wouldn’t have learned in the classroom. So far, this trip has exceeded my expectation. With the trip not over yet, I was excited for what else was to come. After ending our little lesson, our professors told us we were free to roam the rest of the garden. After hearing this, I was exited to see what else was on this large block of land. When roaming the garden, I was able to see things such as roses, bamboo, fallen trees, and a bridge over a river that was within the garden. This river had lots of geese and ducks in it, which allowed for many picture opportunities. After being able to walk through most of the exhibit, it was time to head over to the store and get some lunch before heading over to the next stop on the agenda; the Transportation Museum. Once finishing lunch, myself and two other classmates within our group headed over to the Transportation Museum.

It was an enjoyable trip over to the Transportation Museum because we were able to visit some small shops around the museum before heading inside. Once we finished looking around the shops, we went to the gift shop of the James Bond museum that was right next to the Transportation Museum. Once we got to the James Bond exhibit, we left our friend to visit the exhibit while me and my other friend went onto the Transportation Museum. After we all made it to the Museum, It was time to see what they had to offer. Once we all were ready to head into the museum, we noticed that there was a fee to enter (£15 per student). We didn’t know that there was a fee for museum, as we thought it would be free. We all decided to save our money and not go into the museum, even though it probably would of been enjoyable. But its crunch time to save the rest of our pounds for the remainder of the trip. Even though we didn’t go into the museum, we did get some cool merchandise that would allow us to show our London Underground Pride. After collecting our newly bought gifts, it was time to head back to the hotel and call it a day. When looking back at how this day had went, I would say that this was a very successful day. Since I was able to experience many wonderful views, I will be able to look back on this day and say how great this trip has been. It’s something that I believe I probably will never be able to experience again (unless I come back to London of course). Being able to not only see all of the sights today, also being able to learn a new art form and how it is created is just the icing on the cake. I would say that being able to learn about botanical art while being at this fabulous garden made my experience a lot better and more memorable. I would give this day a 10/10 with a total score of 62/60 so far.

Yesterday we all joined Autumn’s fan group and bought tarot cards, she even gave us a little lesson. I was debating about going back to get another deck because my deck was not the most authentic and there was another deck that was made by a local artist.

Luckily, Autumn was willing to sell me hers. So now I have two very artistic tarot card decks. 

Today we went to the Kew Gardens. It was beautiful! 

This morning at 8:20 we had our first conference call. The conference call was regarding what we should expect at the Hackathon that will happen tomorrow and Sunday. After hearing what we should all expect in the next two days, it made me even more excited to participate.

After having breakfast at the hotel, we went to the Kew Botanical Gardens in Richmond. The Garden covered 326 acres of land and it took Nina, Steven, and I five hours to look at mostly everything. There was a gallery there that had many paintings and drawings of plants that were very realistic and detailed. I can’t imagine painting in gouche paint; it is a pain to work with therefore I have respect for anyone that has the patience to work with it. I enjoyed seeing plants I have never seen before. Regina, who is also a botanical painter, explained her process when trying to paint a subject. The tip that I found most helpful was painting the subject in it’s natural habitat. Regina mentioned that being an artist and designer could benefit from each other. I agree with that statement because it is important to have another artistic talent that doesn’t involve a computer that way you are learning new techniques. These new techniques can apply to design or any other medium and gives the eye a break which is a huge plus. Here are some pictures I took at the Gardens:

After our five hour exploration at the Gardens, Nina, Steven, and I went to Covent Garden. Covent Garden reminded me of Quincy Market in Boston which is one of my favorite places to go when I am back home. Covent Garden had places to shop (high and low end), tons of places to eat, unique kiosks, and of course they had street performers just like Quincy Market. Steven was apart of an entertaining magic trick show where he had to hold up his own jacket for the magician to stab through it with a knife. The magician then used “magic” to fix the hole. Fun fact: Performers at Covent Garden have to tryout in front of judges to claim a time slot to perform.

Now it is time to rest up for the big day at the Hackathon tomorrow. I can’t wait! Talk to you soon!

-Sheila