Rachel's Collections

My friend Rachel collects things; dolls, hearts, photos of shoes, graffitti......

There are some great photographs she has taken on her blog, photos from her travels near and far.

Rachel is also an expert on cabinets of curiosities having made her own 'Cabinet of Hearts' which contains lost hearts, each one telling it's own story.

Frames

I walk past a framing shop everyday, outside are a rack of frames, I never really gave them a second look until about a week ago when I saw a sign on the rack saying 'free frames'!

So what happens when you frame something?

I've never really thought about frames and their influence on the art they surround. I have just read a very interesting article from the Guardian website, in it William Bailey is quoted from his book 'Defining Edges':

"The design, must effect a transition from the existing physical location, usually a wall in a room or a gallery, into the illusionistic realm of the painting. This should occur graciously and imperceptibly. The frame should also prepare the eye and mind of the viewer to accept and embrace the domain of the painting on its own terms."

Changing the frame can elivate the painting into a higher status, giving a picture a guilt frame implies that it is a masterpiece. I have always prefered plain simple dark coloured frames, like underlining a important piece of text, is it saying 'here is my art'?

Bottle Collections

whatever you collect, there will always be a webite!

Historic Bottle Collections

Manchester Hermit

Visit the Manchester Hermit blog and explore the thoughts of the Manchester Hermit, who is living in isolation for 40 days and nights in The Manchester Museum's Gothic tower.

Just been reading through this blog and the comments so far. The Hermit has chosen objects from the museum for his own Cabinet of Curiosities and he is choosing an object each day, if no one puts forward a valid reason to keep the object it will be destroyed. 

The comments on the first object, a skull, are interesting and I'm curious to see how they compare to comments about man made objects or inventions, I'm sure they won't provoke the some type of response.

I am not in favour of destroying anything (you never know when you might need it) but an object stored away in a museum vault is as good as, it may never been seen again..................

Why are the objects in the store rooms, someone thought they were worthy of being in a museum, someone else has decided that they aren't as important as other objects

Catherine the Great Collector

From NY Times:

Catherine [the Great] began buying for her museum in 1764. By 1769 she had bought two of the greatest collections of drawings in Western Europe. One of them belonged to Count Cobenzl, then living in Brussels, who was minister plenipotentiary to Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and a leading figure in the administration of what was then the Austrian Netherlands.
With this single stroke, Catherine the Great acquired more than 4,000 master drawings by Western European artists. Sheets from the Cobenzl collection in the present show include examples of Poussin, Rubens, van Dyck, Primaticcio, Hans Holbein the Elder, Jacob Jordaens, Hendrick Goltzius, Guercino and Greuze. Every one of them is a touchstone of quality. In the Poussin ''Baptism'' -- a sketch for the painting of that name that is a part of Poussin's ''Seven Sacraments'' -- rigor and awe work as equal partners.
Catherine went on to buy 1,020 drawings from the collection of Count Heinrich Bruhl, who was at the time a minister at the court of Saxony in Dresden. Virtually on her own doorstep she also acquired the drawings -- almost 2,000 -- that had been collected by Count Butskoy, the president of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg.

Dirty Dick's

A colleague mentioned 'Dirty Dick's' today, I had never heard of the place. Intrigued I went straight off and googled it. Apparently there was rubbish 'displayed' everywhere, if people left things behind or dropped stuff on the floor it got stuck up on the walls.

from the website:

Nathaniel Bentley was an ironmonger who had a shop in Leadenhall Street. On the eve of his wedding, tragedy struck. His bride-to-be died. So distraught was Nathaniel that he locked up the room in which he had prepared the wedding feast, never to enter it again. A broken man, he neither washed or changed his clothes. When his cats died he just left them. It is thought that Dickens used this tale as the inspiration for Miss Haversham in Great Expectations. The English love an eccentric and his notoriety meant his business flourished. When Nathaniel retired in 1804, the landlord of the Old Port Wine Shop in Bishopsgate bought the contents lock, stock and dead cats. He put them on display at his pub and renamed it 'Dirty Dick's'. In 1870 the pub was rebuilt from ground level, the wine vaults are part of the original building. The 'dirty' contents were carefully relocated in the new pub. Sadly it was decided in the mid nineteen-eighties that a clean up was in order and the dirty artefacts were cleared away.

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