Travel – Page 39 – The Bald Heretic – Short, bald dude with a goofy beard

Colored Lights Can Hypnotize

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San Fernando Cathedral

During festivities in a local park, constantly changing colored lights bathed the exterior of San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas. Kind of reminded me of this. Kind of.

Travel For Art’s Sake

I’m starting to get the itch to travel overseas again. In thinking about where we might go I was pondering where we’ve been. One of the things I that I have really enjoyed in our past 3 trips has been seeing the art museums. This got me to thinking about what we’ve seen and what we haven’t so I went out on the WWW and looked for a list of the 100 must see paintings and found Piero Scaruffi’s “The Greatest Paintings of all Times”list. This lead to finding his top 100 reposted on Listology, complete with pictures of the actual paintings.

I took the top 50 and have highlighted the one’s we’ve seen in our travels:

1. Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights (1504) – Prado, Madrid
2. Michelangelo: Il Giudizio Sistine Chapel (1541) – Cappella Sistina, Roma
3. Ernst: Europe After the Rain II (1942) – Sumner Collection, Hartford
4. Klimt: Beethovenfries (1902) – Sezession, Wien
5. Dali: Persistence of Memory (1931) – Museum of Modern Art, New York
6. Klimt: The Virgin (1913) – National Gallery, Prague
7. Bosch: The Last Judgement (1505) – Gemaldegalerie der Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Wien
8. Klimt: The Kiss (1908) – Belvedere, Wien
9. Botticelli: Allegoria della Primavera (1478) – Uffizi, Firenze
10. Monet: Nimphee (1926) – Orangerie, Paris
11. Dali: Metamorphose de Narcisse (1937) – Tate Gallery, London
12. Leonardo: Il Cenacolo/ The Last Supper (1497) – S.Maria delle Grazie, Milano
13. Rubens: Fall of the Damned – The British Museum
14. Uccello: Battaglia di San Romano/Part I (1456) – Uffizi, Firenze
15. Van Gogh: Starry Night (1889) – Museum of Modern Art, New York
16. Raffaello: Sposalizio della Vergine (1504) – Piancoteca di Brera, Milano
17. Dali: Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (1936) – Museum of Art, Philadelphia
18. Bruegel: Triumph of Death (1562) – Prado, Madrid
19. Botticelli: Nascita di Venere (1485) – Uffizi, Firenze
20. Rubens: The Adoration of the Magi – Prado, Madrid
21. Monet: Cathedrale de Rouen – Musee National d’Orsay, Paris
22. Greco: Toledo (1599) – Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
23. Giotto: Cappella degli Scrovegni, Padova (1305)
24. Cranach: Flugelaltar mit dem Jungsten Gericht (1524) – Gemaldegalerie, Berlin
25. Seurat: La Parade du Cirque (1888) – Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
26. Ernst: La Ville Entiere (1936) – Kunsthaus, Zurich
27. Rembrandt: Militia Company (1642) – Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
28. Van Eyck: Madonna in the Church (1425) – Gemaldegalerie, Berlin
29. Bruegel: The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559) – Kunsthistorisches Museum – Wien
30. Leonardo: Gioconda/ Mona Lisa (1505) – Louvre, Paris
31. Raffaello: Trasfigurazione (1519) – Pinacoteca Vaticana, Roma
32. Rousseau: Sleeping Gypsy (1897) – Museum of Modern Art, New York
33. Piero della Francesca: Leggenda della Vera Croce (1460) – S.Francesco, Arezzo
34. Van Gogh: Potato Eaters (1885) – Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
35. Bruegel: Dutch Proverbs (1559) – Gemaldegalerie, Berlin
36. Greco: La Crucifixion (1594) – Prado, Madrid
37. Seurat: La Grande Jatte (1886) – Art Institute, Chicago
38. Altdorfer: The Battle of Alexander the Great (1529) – Alte Pinakothek, Munchen
39. Monet: The Grainstack (1896) – Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
40. Klee: Ad Marginen (1930) – Kunstmuseum, Basel
41. Rembrandt: Belshazzar’s Feast (1635) – National Gallery, London
42. Van Gogh: Cypresses (1889) – Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
43. Rubens: St Agustine, National Gallery, Prague
44. Van Eyck: Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife (1434) – National Gallery, London
45. Renoir: Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1876) – Musee National d’Orsay, Paris
46. Renoir: Le Dejeuner des Canotiers (1881) – Phillips Collection, Washington
47. Goya: Aquelarre/ Il Grande Caprone (1821) – Prado, Madrid
48. Velasquez: Las Meninas (1656) – Prado, Madrid
49. Chagall: I and the Village (1911) – Museum of Modern Art, New York
50. Van der Weyden: Deposition (1435) – Prado, Madrid

Of course there is really no way to make a truly comprehensive list and there’s certainly some pieces we’ve seen that didn’t make this particular cut. It’s more a frame of reference for me in thinking about past and future destinations.

That being said, if I weight the decision based on this list, Berlin, Vienna and Prague are starting to look VERY interesting.

Un paseo en el Sol

Remembrances

Cynthia continues to chug away at the scrapbook for the trip to Spain. She’s completed Madrid, Seville, Segovia and Toledo.

Granada and Barcelona are going to be HUGE.

She’s already filled 1 1/2 giant binders full of photos, ephemera and her own recollections of the vacation. I bet this will be 4-6 binders by the time it’s done.

This has propelled me forward in processing my photos. I have completed the following galleries here at baldheretic.com

Madrid	Madrid – Retiro Park
Madrid – Segway Tour	Segovia
Seville	Seville – Alcazar
Cordoba	Toledo
Granada	Granada – The Alhambra

There’s a partial gallery for Barcelona, but it is not complete.

Oh, and I should not forget the nearly complete gallery for William The Well Travelled Sheep…

William The Sheep in Spain!

[tag]Spain, Madrid, Segovia, Seville, Toledo, Granada, Alhambra, photography, Sony Alpha 100, travel, Europe, Segway, Memories, Jay Lee[/tag]

Figueres

Still going through the pics from the trip. We’ve printed out the ones from Madrid we want to use in the scrapbook. Cynthia’s bought some supplies and she’ll likely start this weekend.

Looking at the shots from Figueres I am reminded how desolate and very depressing that small town was. We had taken the four hour train ride so we could visit the Dali Museum. Trust me, you had better REALLY want to see the Dali museum because that is ALL there is to see there.

While waiting for the train to take us back to Barcelona I set the camera to black and white mode and took a few pictures to help us remember the mood of that leg of our journey.

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La Torre Del Oro

On our last night in Madrid (Oct. 24th) we hung out at La Torre Del Oro, a very interesting tapas bar in the Plaza Mayor dedicated to bull fighting.

Neither Cynthia nor myself are fans of this sport and we had no intention of witnessing a bull fight, but this little place was fascinating. Mounted on the wall were the heads of some notable bulls from previous fights as well as photo after photo of various toreadors.

And in the corner was a small television set showing previously recorded bull fights. It was like a bull fighting sports bar!

The bartender and Cynthia had a very animated discussion (in Spanish) wherein the rules and nuances of the sport were explained and discussed. I must confess, it was compelling to watch as the drama played out on the small TV. It was especially odd when they would show a slow motion replay of some particularly noteworthy cape swooshing.

I picked up bits and pieces of what was being said and I recall at one point, as the time was drawing near when the toreador would actually strike the killing blow, the matter of taking an ear as a trophy came up. That was when Cynthia looked at the mounted heads in the room and exclaimed “THEY HAVE NO EARS!”

I enjoyed a few beers while this was going on, all the while just looking around and snapping a few pics like this one of a shrine/alter I can only presume was intended to keep the bull fighters safe from harm.

All in all, a very fun evening.

[tags] Spain, Madrid, Bull Fighting, Tapas [/tags]

Fotomat

I’ve been spending a few hours each day sifting through photos from the trip. It’s an arduous task. I am processing over 3,000 images collected while we were in Spain.

The main goal is to isolate the ones I want to print, edit them if necessary and then make a re sized copy for upload to the gallery.

On the one hand, it’s fun going through the images. On the other hand, it’s making me a little loopy.

While I was processing the pics from Seville I noticed that I had two pictures of the garden of the Alcazar that were pretty cool. They got me to thinking that I really was wishing for a super wide angle on that day to try to capture more of the garden in one shot instead of these two:

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Thanks to Photoshop, I now have the shot I couldn’t get in the field….

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Back to work to the photo-mines….

Beggar – Madrid

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