Today is a bit of a half-and-half affair. Last night I discovered a Botanical Art workshop on meetup.com which starts at 2pm. This gives me just enough time to check out that "Living Gods" exhibition at the British Museum I have been meaning to toddle up to.
I don't visit the British Museum very often - If it does change its exhibitions then they simply are not themes that capture my attention when I prowl the internet for knowledge, distraction and general procrastination - but I always enjoy it when I do visit. Its shamelessly vast, sparse, grandiose, gleaming white oh-so-perpetually-clean marble foyer with its trademark twin staircases leading up to the museum itself remind me of a futuristic cityscape from a computer RPG. NO museum requires a space this huge with nothing in it.
A hike up the stairway to the left, a hike down the stairway to the left, a trip to the ticket kiosk (£15 payment) and a hike back up the stairway to the left finds me face to face with an ancient hand-carved humanoid lion totem from 11,000 years ago. With a guesstimate of taking 500 hours to carve (however the hell they worked that out) the experts with the label machine write that this totem would have taken valuable time and resources at a period in human history when survival was very difficult, and must have been considered a worthy investment of time. Having once saved all my wages for 2 months to buy a PlayStation 2, I quibble this. But I like the totem. Anything Palaeolithic is stroke-worthy in my opinion.
For me the exhibition in general did not live up to expectation though. For one, I was envisaging at least a nod at our favourite Hollywood/Channel 5 religions.... Ancient Greek... Egyptian... Maybe a bit of Norse mythology. But this exhibition seemed actively keen to avoid that. Its focus was upon modern day religions. Which, again, I could work with... but with such a vast topic, its exhibits barely hinted towards to putting the merest indication of a dent in the subject. And if it was going to focus on modern day religions, I felt it could also delve further into the impact those religions have on their respective cultures... Do religious beliefs affect how a man goes about his day and those around him? But what I found were a few model examples from a select few religious. Fire dogs and a miniature house from the Japanese Shinto religion... hand made spirit dolls from another... a quick polite nod to Christianity that felt almost exclusively as though it was simply to appease the host country... It was of interest, but I felt it had the promise to be considerably more.
But hey, at least it got me from beginning to end in timely enough fashion to wolf down some breakfast at a greasy spoon (my eating establishment of choice - IDST) and trot the 2 mile walk to the next event on my itinerary.
The Art Class was held in the basement of a tea room which had the courtesy to stock a decent range of herbal teas. Sipping on cardamom tea and hating every moment of it but feeling a wonderfully self-satisfied glow of healthy accomplishment, I introduced myself to the tutor and to the range of H and B pencils I had yet to fully understand. This is the first class, she explained when we had all arrived, and we would be starting simply. I started with an apple, and apparently this was not simple enough. After many onions and 2 Death Stars I achieved a vaguely 3D rendition of what might feasibly be considered an apple, if only identified from a tennis ball from the fact it had a stalk. I left early to catch my train with home work to practice my 3D shading.
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