Sunday 19 February 2012

Bridges

It has been a weekend of bridges this week.  My daughter is collating photographs for her Higher Art and wanted some pictures of industrial objects including bridges.  So we went out to South Queensferry - a lovely out of town trip for another day with more time in it - to take pictures of the Forth Bridge.  See below.  What a wonderful piece of Victorian engineering it is!  If I am honest, however, from a design and symmetry point of view, I prefer the Road Bridge which is more majestic.


We also went to the National Museum on Chambers Street.  I have written about this before as it has recently reopened after a major refurbishment and looks fantastic with some real thought about how the collections overlap and about the design of the collections, creating shapes and images.  However, we were mainly in the Museum of Scotland section which is relatively new, but not part of the refurbishment.  This is a picture of what I consider the most interesting thing in the whole museum (apart, maybe from the Lewis Chessmen).  It is a piece of the original Tay Bridge.  Badly built and beset by troubles, the bridge collapsed into the Tay in 1879 killing everyone on board the train crossing it at the time.  This piece of bridge was found in a house in Broughty Ferry!  It is the way the end of it is ripped, as thought it were made of plasticine, that amazes me. A really fascinating close up of how even what seems to be the strongest of things is actually pliable and breakable.

Tuesday 7 February 2012

Happy Birthday Mr Dickens

"I have in my employ a literary man with a wooden leg" - my favourite Dickens character is Nicodemus Boffin.  While some Dickens can be hard to read , he would have benefited from a firm editor, there are some great characters and brilliant plotlines.

The picture is nothing to do with Dickens.  I just thought this page was rather bleak without anything more picturesque on it.  This is actually a very good drawing of Elie in Fife done by a good friend.