My Met 11:27 PM

Because I have this never-ending love affair with The Met, I couldn't help but join the museum's newest social media campaign: My Met.  Talk about a perfect way to get people emotionally engaged.

I was just expecting to be one of the many people submitting entries without ever getting an acknowledgement; with The Met's thousands and thousands of visitors and fans, it's hard to expect anything. So you can imagine my happiness and surprise when I got a notification from The Met on Twitter just this Friday saying that my submission is the featured entry of this week!

It is really so sweet of them. They even linked my entry on their Facebook page, and I'm amazed to see that their announcement on my submission garnered 200+ likes and 40+ shares. Wow, thank youuu!! I hope the MyMet campaign spurs more people to submit.

Me being such a big starry-eyed fan of The Met, I took the opportunity to make a screen grab of my submission, which I hope stays in the museum's web archives forever! If you want to see previous MyMet submissions, click here.

What also bowled me over is that The Met has now started following me on Twitter. Oh. Wow. I'm starting to feel pressured.  Should I come up with less inane tweets about my life?

So here's the screen grab of my featured entry. Okay, I know, 'home' must be quite boring and corny for so many, but The Met is really just that.  It's the place where I feel most at home when I'm in New York.  I've been there around 10 times, and I still feel like I can't get enough of it. There's this sense of familiarity, of belonging that washes over me whenever I step inside. Even the lamb gyro and coffee stands in front of the museum have become solid favorites of mine, because they're all part of my Met experience.

Last January, before I was set to return to Manila, I was feeling rather morose going around The Met and The Cloisters, knowing it was going to be a long while before I'd see these places again. So there I was, wandering around the galleries and desperately snapping up whatever souvenirs I could afford to get.

Seeing the MyMet campaign online made me miss my favorite NY hangout even more.  The campaign asks you to choose up to eight favorite art pieces--a difficult task, if you ask me. I have loads of favorites.  Here they are (and I'd most probably update this blog entry to add the ones I unintentionally forgot!) in no particular order.

(All the following images are from The Metropolitan Museum's website, so please don't use them for commercial purposes.)

Vincent van Gogh's Wheat Field with Cypresses

Vincent van Gogh's Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat

Okay, this isn't obviously an image from The Met collection; I just had to squeeze in a photo of me looking really happy to be inside a room full of van Goghs at the Met. You can tell he's my favorite guy!

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's Ugolino and His Sons. One of my all-time favorite sculptures. It is overpoweringly huge and beautiful to look at from any angle. More people should see this; I feel that it's so underrated.  Someday, I hope to sketch this in full...

Georges de La Tour's The Fortune Teller. I love how this painting tells a very interesting story.

The Unicorn in Captivity (from The Unicorn Tapestries). I took the long journey up north to The Cloisters TWICE just to see my favorite tapestry. Seeing this and the rest of The Cloisters are always worth it.

Saw Alexander McQueen's 'Savage Beauty' Exhibit during my first ever visit to the Met. This Oyster Dress is magical. McQueen WAS magical.

Marc Chagall's The Lovers. Just like a dream. :)

Shiva as the Lord of Dance. I drew this once for a history paper on Hinduism which I had to do back in high school. I made it a point to see Shiva on my last winter visit to the Met. It was one of those full-circle moments. :P

Salvador Dali's The Accommodations of Desire. Dali's a genius. And his paintings always give me the heebie jeebies.

From A Hotel in the Cours d'Albret, Bordeaux. In the Met's European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Wing, there are rooms and rooms containing all these priceless artifacts and furniture found in the grand mansions of the European nobility. I stumbled into this wing by accident; I didn't know at first that The Met would have these kinds of sets!

Model Granary from the Tomb of Meketre. Dioramas fascinate me, and anything about Egypt is automatically interesting for me. This miniature model is so wonderfully preserved. I saw other models in the American Museum of Natural History and, if I'm lucky, I look forward to seeing more like it in the Cairo Museum.

The Temple of Dendur. Saved from destruction and carried brick by brick to US shores.

Another shameless photo plug. As you can see from this picture, the Egyptian Wing is a heavy favorite because of the Temple of Dendur.

Johannes Vermeer's Young Woman With a Water Pitcher. For some strange reason, I'm so attached to this painting. I had to see her again on my last visit to The Met. I stayed in the room where 'she' was until it was time for the museum guide to tell me that the place was closing. :(

I have so many photos taken at The Met that I'll probably upload an entire Facebook album of it one of these days.  I miss the place dreadfully.  When I visit New York again (hopefully in the next 2 or 3 years), The Met is sure to be at the top of my to-see list. After all, it's always a second home.

It's a paper world 11:42 PM

In case you've been following me lately on Instagram or on my Twitter account, I've been going gaga over this paper miniature Japanese sushi bar I've been working on at home for the past several nights. It's now done--and I just realized I don't know what to do with this miniature set, haha. I guess the joy is more on the making of it.

Here it is! Any takers? It's a lovely little thing, albeit with a few tiny imperfections. I asked my sister to put her hand on the roof top just so you have an idea on how small the set is.

 
Yup, it's all made out of paper. You can download this sushi bar template for free at Paper Museum.  Good luck, though, because the website and the instructions for all the templates are in Japanese!

But if you've been doing papercraft for a while, the set of instructions for the sushi bar should pretty much be a no-brainer.



I started first with the sushi bar's foundation and the entrance to the restaurant, which looks so very Japanese.





My favorite part of the project was making the sushi bar itself. A lot of detail, and a whole lot of patience.





I wouldn't have been able to do all these little things without glue and my X-Acto knives.





My bottle of Elmer's Glue looks like a giant standing next to the set.


There are a few more miniature sets in Paper Museum which are irresistibly cute, like the cafe and the bakery and the vegetable market, but I went for the sushi bar because it appealed to me most.

This Japanese sushi bar isn't my first papercraft project. Since October of last year, my officemate Thess and I have been going crazy over paper miniatures.  It all started when we were brainstorming with the rest of the fundraising team on how we were going to decorate our work area in time for the annual Halloween Trick-or-Treat party for children in our office.

Thess started scouring the web for decoration ideas and came across this fantastic site, RavensBlight, which offers fun Halloween-themed paper projects for free (FREE! Don't you just love these artists who are so unselfish about their work?). Although we ended up making large-scale art stuff for the Trick-or-Treat event, the girls and I created some Halloween papercraft miniatures on the side during our free time.

Being such newbies, we printed on bond paper, cut the designs out, and stuck them on used cardboard. It's amazing what paper, old cardboard, glue and scissors can do.

I made this paper haunted house for my 3-year-old goddaugher, Ashley, to play with. The monster dolls were prepared by Thess, her mother. Fun! Template can be found at RavensBlight.

The haunted cliff house--another miniature which you can download from RavensBlight and assemble. Very easy.

The first paper tree I made for Halloween. A ladder is a must.

Another of my Halloween paper tree creations, which I placed along the corridor

Although the trees I made for Halloween aren't exactly diorama small, I had great fun making them. I taped large black cartolinas together, stuck them on the wall, drew the trees and cut out the parts I didn't need. A lot of the excess cartolinas were used to make the branches. Thank God I don't have any fear of heights, because I was on the ladder most of the time, working on the branches. 

The Halloween trees are largely inspired from the tree wall art I saw in MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York when I visited last August 2011. My trees aren't perfect--and I would have wanted to add more branches, had I the time to do so--but a few people said they found the trees really lovely in a Tim Burton-esque way. (Wow, that already means a lot to me!)

The beautiful paper art beside my trees were made by my colleague Nina, who is the real artist in the team, by the way. As you can see, we had a Haunted Forest Graveyard theme going on here. The rest of the team had a blast sticking cobwebs everywhere, making paper coffins, setting up creepy ambient sounds and placing dry ice in strategic places for that desired fog effect.

I have a pretty good idea already of which paper miniature set I want to work on next. I always want to keep graduating onto more complicated miniature stuff just so I won't get bored. (At some point while I was making the Japanese sushi bar, I was watching a few Doctor Who episodes with my sister Steffi.)

Some castles and a few dioramas would be great to make, although if I keep doing all this papercraft, I'd run out of space at home! My sisters think I'm a bit of a freak, hunched over the table, creating little paper maki rolls. Maybe if I did a paper miniature set of Jersey Shore (cringe cringe), Karla would have a wee bit of appreciation for my papercraft obsession.

 More papercraft blog posts in the near future!

sketching Victory 10:10 PM

Sketch and photo © 2011/Gina Sales

I wish I had the time to sketch more.

It seems I only get to do it during moments when I have to save myself from perilously falling asleep. On one very important yet--sadly enough--dreary conference where you could actually do a counting game on how often the term 'Excel spreadsheet' crops up, I decided to keep my eyes and hands busy even though my brain cells were somewhat shutting down.

So I started sketching on my Moleskine an image of the winged goddess Victory of Samothrace based on a photo I took of the actual sculpture when I was in the Louvre last March 2010.

I can never draw the human form from memory; that's a skill I sorely lack.  But I feel a sense of happiness from being able to sketch on paper whatever I can see from my own eyes. I normally use a black tech pen like Pilot for informal amateur sketches like this. I never use pencil. Art class in high school taught me to be conservative in pen strokes so that I don't have to depend on using a pencil for drafts so much.

I ended up having an affinity for pen-and-ink and even charcoal. I remember bringing home a rough charcoal sketch I made of Charles Dickens to show to my mom.  I'm fearfully disastrous when it comes to watercolor, so I have made black ink my comfort zone. I don't consider myself an artist because I can't create something out of my imagination, but I'd gladly do a decent sketch of anything I clap my eyes on.

Most museums, unfortunately, don't allow pens for sketching. So when I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (for at least 10 times, damnit), I could only take high-res, close-up photos of sculptures which I would have wanted to sketch then and there. I'll probably set aside these photos for future moments of ennui that would allow me the time and luxury of drawing on paper.

So here's my finished sketch of the goddess Victory:

Sketch and photo © 2011/Gina Sales

It's not perfect, and God knows I would have wanted the wings to have been less 'heavy-looking.' I remember gazing up at this sculpture, surrounded by fellow tourists and art lovers, and admiring how the artist captured Victory in mid-action, as she strode forward with a purpose, her wings elegantly outstretched.  She seemed even more beautiful and mysterious without the head and the arms.

I hope I have done this favorite sculpture of mine a little justice somehow.

I remember too as I sat beside a young Italian man inside the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence on that same month I went to Paris. There was a large crowd, as always, in front of Michaelangelo's David.  It was sheer pleasure just to look at David (for aesthestic, purely non-sexual purposes) and study the tension in his limbs as he held his sling over his shoulder. The young man beside me (who looked like a local student about 21 years old) was using a pencil to sketch the sculpture, and I admired his efforts to capture THE David.

I'd be afraid to try it myself, actually. And if I did, it would take me days to finish the sketch.  But the young man was drawing him reverently--hesitantly too, I'd say, as if he was dreadfully afraid to mess up on paper what was perfect right in front of one's eyes. His drawing was still rough, for he had just more or less started. I could tell he was struggling with the face--which has always been my own Waterloo. At least the young man and I had something in common.

We chatted a bit (he in halting English and I in my atrocious Italian) and I made sure to compliment him on his draft. He seemed grateful and emboldened by my praise, and so he went back to sketching David's face with a noticeably steadier hand. I left his side eventually so he could spend the rest of the day drawing without much distraction. The entrance fee to the gallery wasn't exactly a trivial amount, so I'm sure he wanted to maximize his stay indoors.

Sometimes, I idly wonder how his sketch turned out. And I wonder too if I would dare to sketch something as complex as David one of these days.

Life hanging by a thread 8:48 AM

Well, not in a morbid way, but at least in artsy terms.

Saw this in Swiss Miss, and was enamored. Like what Swiss Miss said, it's 'almost poetic how you're supposed to pull on the yarn as time goes by.'

Europe in 2 Weeks: Florence (part 2) 12:11 AM

I came to Florence to see art, and art I did see. Truckfuls of it.

Because the city is so small, one can actually see most--or at least the highlights--of Florence in a day. As much as I would have wanted to stay for at least 3 days, I couldn't, so I had to make the most of my full day in this city. Armed with my Rick Steves travel guide and quite infected by the la dolce vita attitude of my opera-singing hotel host earlier at breakfast, I stepped out into the cobblestoned streets and was psyched to have some sensory overload on Renaissance art.

While some people may scoff at the idea of touting a travel guide and looking like a real tourist, I find it even more stupid to wander about aimlessly without a plan especially when you don't have the luxury of, say, a whole month's stay. With Rick Steves and Google Maps plus online booking of my tickets to the museums, I was able to carefully plan my route around Florence and still have extra time to go wandering about for the rest of the day. Cheers to obsessive-compulsive planning!

Here, in chronological order, are the highlights of my 'Renaissance' Walk:

1. The Uffizi Gallery. Of course it had to be the first thing on the agenda. I'm no art historian or curator, but I love art enough to know what the Uffizi holds and how badly I wanted to see them all. Because the lines at the Uffizi are reputed to be ridiculously long (people wait in line for 4-5 hours in high season), I wasted no time and booked myself a ticket to the Gallery while I was still in Manila. The funny thing about museums in Italy is that when you book online, you have to choose a certain time slot. The Italians are fussy about not letting in too many people at the same time, so they prefer to have only 20 people per time slot entering the museum.

So I got myself the 8:30 am slot (the Uffizi opens at 8 am), and this was a good strategy, I believe, because I was there early enough to avoid the hordes of students on field trip and those tourist groups that are annoyingly ubiquitous and ruin basically the peace and quiet of a museum.

Taking photos isn't allowed inside the museum, so I took some pictures while I was outside.

I'm finally here!!

a part of the Uffizi was being restored

street performer decked out like one of the many statues flanking the Gallery

Spent a good two hours inside the Uffizi, which had the finest collection of Botticellis ever. There was also a sprinkling of da Vincis and Michaelangelos and Raphaels, which made me rather dizzy. The museum was overwhelming--not in size, but in the wealth of paintings that it boasted. Giotto's Madonna was there, and so was da Vinci's Annunciation, and Titian's Venus of Urbino. When I got to the room full of Botticellis, all I could do was sit and stare at his Birth of Venus and La Primavera.

The whole experience was unsettling. Everything was just reeking of beauty and culture, and this was the kind of art I've only seen before in art books. And Botticelli's Venus was staring back at me, looking like she was amused by my gawking but was trying to hide it behind her serene smile.


2. The Duomo and the Baptistery. Stumbled out of the Gallery, dazed and experiencing an Uffizi hangover of sorts. Next on the agenda was the ever-famous cathedral, the cultural symbol of Florence. The Duomo, after all, is the main reason why I wanted to go to Florence. All roads in the city seemed to lead to it, so it was very easy to find.

The area surrounding the Duomo is always packed with tourists. Tourists, tourists everywhere. It was such an infamously popular spot. I stood in one area for a full 20 minutes perhaps, just taking loads of pictures before deciding to circle the perimeter of the pink-green-and-white marbled church. I saw artists selling their works on the street, people having their coffee leisurely al fresco in the surrounding cafes, and individuals strolling about like they weren't in a hurry to reach their destination. It was a sweet life indeed for the people of Florence--and it was all almost ridiculously unreal and far from the madding crowd that was Manila.

The church itself is pure eye candy; you can honestly stare at it for a long time. Well, at least I did. Didn't get tired looking at it. I was afraid that if I didn't gaze at it long enough, I'd forget some of the small details, or at least the memory of having this wave of happiness wash over me, because I was really and truly in Florence with the Duomo just several meters away from me. It was the same feeling I had when I was looking up at the Colosseum and at the Sistine Chapel. Maybe it was some form of I'm-surrounded-by-so-much-history-and-it's-all-so-beautiful orgasm (for lack of a better word). There must be an exact scientific name for this state of euphoria in the presence of art and history that I was in, but I just didn't know it.

the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore (or the Duomo, for short)

the Duomo's interior artwork

crowds and crowds of tourists around the Duomo all day

Right next to the Duomo is the Baptistery, the oldest and very much revered building in the city. It wasn't difficult looking for the 'Gates of Paradise' by Ghiberti. Just look for the bronze panels with the biggest crowd of tourists hanging about, and you know you're in the right place.

Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise. The original panels are safely stored inside the Duomo museum though.

3. Michaelangelo's 'David'. Grabbed a pizza in a nearby pizzeria-slash-cafe and decided to eat it while heading towards the Galleria dell'Accademia. The air was cold, and the pizza warm in my hands, so it was a good albeit hurried meal on the way to the museum.

Aside from the 'David', which is the real reason why people flock to the Accademia in the first place, there's really not much else to see there except Michaelangelo's unfinished 'Slaves'.

I entered the museum, walked down a short corridor, and rounded a corner, anticipating that I was going to go through more halls to get to David. I didn't expect that that one corner would be it, that I would see him immediately. And so there he stood, high on his pedestal at the very far end of the hallway, literally--and without reference to his nether region--larger than life.

I was to have many heart-hammering-in-my-chest moments while I was in Europe, checking out all the sites and art I've dreamt of seeing my whole life. This was one of those heart-pounding moments. Just when you think you're ready to see 'David', the masterpiece, you realize you're as flabbergasted and slack-jawed as the tourist standing next to you.

The beauty of his position inside the museum was that people could circle him; we weren't limited to one view. I stood for a long time, just circling his slowly. I loved the expertly chiseled back, the veins on his arms, the tension of the muscles. When I couldn't stand anymore, I sat down in a corner, right next to a young man sketching David on his drawing pad. I watched the guy draw for a bit, and envied him for the luxury of time he had. Then I complimented his drawing, and so did a few others who came up to him. He thanked me and the others effusively.

The nice thing about being in an art-soaked city like Florence is that everyone is so appreciative about everything related to art. There could be a chalk artist sketching on the sidewalk an exact copy of a Madonna and Child painting, and people would be standing round, just watching and waiting for him to finish.

Strictly no photo-taking allowed while in the presence of David, but of course I just HAD to take a stolen shot. David is perfect, perfect, perfect.

4. Dante Alighieri. Who isn't fascinated by Dante? The Inferno? And most of all, the elusive Beatrice whom he loved?

Florence is so small you'll wind up in Via Dante Alighieri at some point whether you're looking for it or not. I was as pleased as punch to be in the very street the great poet used to live in. God, these Florentines are just so damn lucky to be walking past it everyday.

On the street where he lived. And now it's called Dante Alighieri Street.

Dante's Church, where Beatrice's tomb is located. Too bad Dante is buried in Ravenna; it would have been nice to see both their tombs side by side.

5. Gelato is an art form too! Even if it was the tail end of winter, I had to have some of that world-famous gelato. Besides, everyone else was strolling about, each licking a gelato cone, so I wasn't going to pass that up. There were so many gelato shops to choose from, I was pretty much dizzy with desire.

So...I prudently chose a small gelateria which had a bunch of people lining up, and I thought, okay, they must be serving extra yummy gelato. I went and stood in line and had the most awful, hand-wringing dilemma to face: which flavors to get?

The lady behind the counter was getting slightly impatient; I was practically cross-eyed from all that frantic canvassing of flavors, and because I didn't want to risk facing a crowd of angry gelato fans all lined up behind me, I stammered out in basic Italian that I would like a medium-sized cone with two flavors--coffee and chocolate. Ordinary flavors, yeah, but when I started on my gelato, I realized there was nothing ordinary about the coffee and chocolate I was licking. It was so good I almost forgot where I was heading.

Oh my God, that was the best gelato ever. I still dream about it sometimes. The gelatos I've had in Gelatissimo in Greenbelt 5 don't even come close to that simple treat I had in that rather nondescript gelateria in Florence.

my gelato leading the way

6. Here are more of the city's beautiful sights. I would have wanted to talk more about them, but I keep telling myself to be a little less long-winding.

Piazza della Republica, the old city center

This always reminds me of the movie 'A Room With a View.' :)

the Arno River

inside the very cold, very drafty Palazzo Vecchio


Ponte Vecchio


Piazza della Signoria

my favorite part of the Orsanmichele Church

Was pretty much able to wander about the city without feeling so hurried. It really does help sometimes to explore things on your own. Had enough time to go back to the hotel in the late afternoon, grab my luggage and head for Santa Maria Novella station. Apparently, to go back to Rome, I had to take the 5-minute train from SMN to Firenze Rifredi Station. And when I got there 30 minutes before the train's scheduled departure, it was announced that the train that was arriving to take me back to Rome would be 45 minutes late.



Rifredi's waiting area was outdoors, by the tracks. A real provincial train station. Inspite of my wool coat, thermals, and a scarf covering my neck and half of my face, I felt pretty chilled. Spent the next hour or so alternately reading about the Persian-Greek Wars and stomping about my bench to ward off the cold. Definitely not one of my favorite memories of Florence.

I made a mental note to myself that if (and I know I will) I was to go back to Florence, it would have to be some time in spring. And yes, it would have to be a week's stay. The city is just too beautiful.


Florence, March 22-23, 2010