Day 4

I absolutely loved the tour of Westminster Abbey. It's such a beautiful and sad building with so much history. I really loved was the story of The Unknown Soldier and the idea that whoever's buiried in Westminster Abbey represents all the soliders that died in World War 1. I found it very sweet, sad, and romantic in a sense, though I'm not completely sure why.
I really enjoyed seeing the Latin written on the tombs, such as "Veni Domine Iesv veni cito" [Come Lord Jesus come quickly]. I also saw a lot of depictions of animals, my favorite being the porcupine which was the symbol of a sweet family that was not to be messed with. Unfortunately, I don't remember which family it was.
I thought our tour guide was hilarious and told us some of the best stories, like the origin of the hand sign for "fuck you" [French soldiers used to cut off the first two fingers of an English bowman, so the bowmen liked to present their first two fingers to boast to the Frenchmen that they hadn't caught them yet.]
I really enjoyed the Muybridge exhibit. I found it interesting how he's so well known for his motion series' that people forget that he's done extraordinary, beautiful landscapes and that he's slaved over panoramas. I didn't realize that he used elements from photos to manipulate other photos; if I had known, I would have paid more attention to the details in each individual photograph. One photo I really loved was Ruins of a Church, Antigua. It's such a beautiful picture that really demonstrates what darkening an image can do to a photo: in this case, it brought out the building's dark side and gave it a gloomy overtone.
I appreciated Rachel Whiteread's work as well. I found her sketches especially to be very beautiful and just aestetically pleasing. Her Lid and Hole made me stop and stare for a long time. I really liked how she added the black paint to the simple ink sketching to create depth. Water Tower caught my eye as well. At first I thought it was a painting, then I realized that she took a picture and used ink to manipulate it, or something along those lines. I loved her postcard studies, which were simply and playfully manipulated.
Although I really enjoyed Brigitte Jurack's visit [she was so energetic and got very cute whenever she was either delighted or angry], I can't say I remember a lot of what was said. Honestly, I started falling asleep at some point =X I do remember the sculptures she's done of people, however. I liked that she was able to capture the sadder side of the person sitting on the bridge column looking as though he's about to jump.