On Monday, March 2nd my 2 daughters and I set out on a road trip…a road trip for a number reasons…to visit with family again, for me to see one of my customers in Toronto, to hopefully see a few friends along the way and also to deliver paintings to my sister, Mom and Dad…they had all come up to see my show and had all bought paintings…6 in total between them! I won’t get any chance to paint during this trip…but I will be filling the well…
We set out on a sunny, but cold day…in fact the weather has remained sunny so far…but cold! The drive was quiet…the girls slept, mostly, and had their iPods…so I got to play my CDs!
Toronto was our first stop…we have set up our base ‘camp’ at my sister and her hubby’s beautiful house that is up for sale…they are building out in Uxbridge and have moved to a condo down in Yorkville…what a dangerous place that would be to live! Amazing art galleries and boutiques right outside their door! And The Guild Shop just across the street! It is a great neighbourhood! We have been going down to their condo for dinner, or out to restaurants nearby…what a treat it has been! Wonderful accommodations, great food and wine…love getting to see family…art galleries to pop into!
Here is the house we are staying at…it’s for sale if you are interested! Great location…just a few minutes to downtown Toronto…lovely neighbourhood…
There are beautiful sculptures from Bali in the back yard…
On Tuesday I had a job to do…one of my senior customers moved to Toronto a couple years ago and I try to stop in to see her and help her out whenever I am in town. That took up the morning and early afternoon…then I picked up the girls (who got to sleep in) and we went down to meet my sister and wander around Yorkville…went into the Mira Godard Gallery and saw some beautiful art…a Christopher Pratt triptych that was amazing, a fantastic Joe Faffard horse and lots of other wonderful eye candy! We also stopped in to The Guild Shop…oh, what a store!!!…I think if I lived where my sister does, that I would have to go in daily…but things would talk to me…and that is dangerous! When we were down just after Christmas, Cariño, my sister and I had gone in and I had seen a print by Michael Robinson that I had seen last summer up in a gallery in Tobermory, which spoke to me…I got all excited when I saw it again…there were also some paintings by the same guy…all wonderful…but there is something about this print that I just love…I had to leave it in the store though (even though I knew it would talk to me…probably even haunt me!)…it didn’t have to haunt me for long though…my sister bought it for me for my birthday!!! She brought it up to Ottawa and gave it to me when she came with my Dad to see my show! The print is called The Poet and the Song...
On Wednesday the girls and I all had a sleep in and then my elder daughter and I went to the AGO…my younger daughter isn’t into going to galleries, so she stayed at the house and got picked up by my sister later and we all met up again.
The new AGO is something to see…just amazingly beautiful…I got very carried away photographing the stairs…the curving wood ones…when we went up them, they seemed to go on forever and they are beautiful and different at each twist and turn! We didn’t have very long to visit…but what we saw was great…
Here is my elder daughter…we stopped for a coffee and cookie at a little café kitty corner to the AGO…the sun streaming in the window was lovely…
Outside of the café we had this view of the CN Tower…and this interesting, very different building…the black and white one…these are my 2 favourite shots of the corner…I like all the lines in this first one…and in the second I like how busy it is and the variety of textures…lines and people and buildings…I am standing kitty corner to the AGO…taking these street shots reminded me of the couple of years I spent at Ryerson in Toronto in the Photographic Arts program…
I didn’t get a very good exterior shot of the AGO…
I had been told, that if nothing else, I had to make sure that I saw the Galleria Italia…it runs along the whole front of the AGO up on the second floor…it is beautiful…there are some amazing sculptures there…huge rough-hewn timbers with parts of them carved into trees…like the core of a carrot…the carved branches lined up with the knots in the timber surrounding the carved part…it was all one piece…with the part carved into the whole…there were many of these carved timbers up on the interior wall…each with some part of it carved into a tree…in the middle of the space there was a huge piece of a tree…it was so big around it would have taken 3 or 4 people to circle it with arms outstretched…inside a part of it, it was carved away to the core and a tree was carved out of the core, again with the branches matching the knots…I took a picture of my daughter and just happened to catch it in the background…it was amazing…beautiful, fascinating…one of our favourite pieces!
There was also a huge room full of gigantic Henry Moore plaster casts…everything larger than life…curvy and voluptuous…I couldn’t take any pictures in there because I was not allowed to take pictures of the art…up in the café at the top of the beautiful stairs there is a great panoramic photograph of the Moore room…I meant to look in the gallery shop to see if they had it for sale…but forgot by the time I got back down to the main floor! I was caught up in eye candy overload…
The stairs are a work of art on their own…like I said earlier…I got a bit carried away photographing them…just a tad…here are my ten favourite shots…
Tomorrow we head up north a bit to Little Tammy’s…will work on another post then…we are having a fun road trip so far!
1 comment:
What an awesome road trip! I could meditate upon the stairs for days. Very beautiful. Enjoy this quality time with your daughters!
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