In my last post I mentioned my travel plans for the following year. At the top of my to do lists is to visit museums, art galleries, castles, and country houses when I am travelling abroad. I have been fortunate to visit some of Europe’s largest museums as well as some of the quirkiest museums. Read on for my top three museums that I’ve visited in mainland Europe!
On my extended trip to Scotland last August I took time out to visit one of my favourite parts of Scotland; the small fishing village and artists town of Kirkcudbright, Dumfries and Galloway in south-west Scotland. I had deliberately picked up Daisy Chain: a novel of The Glasgow Girls by Maggie Ritchie which is set in Kirkcudbright as well as Glasgow and other foreign locations.
For as long as I can remember I have always loved books, reading, libraries, and all book and reading related ephemera – I have an obscene amount of bags from book shops and numerous book marks! I get my love of reading from my grand-father who was a voracious reader of many genres and types of books. He would have made an ideal English literature or history teach had his life circumstances been different.
The lack of a teaching job didn’t stop him handing down his enthusiasm to me and I have many fond memories of going to the library with him on Saturday mornings to return my books and inevitably borrowing even more. Nothing thrilled me more as a child when the librarian stamped my book which made the book mine for the next week or however long it took to read it.
Puppets from King Stag, 1918.
As mentioned in my last post I had the great opportunity to visit the Sophie Taeuber-Arp retrospective at the Tate Modern, London, in October 2021. Sophie Taeuber-Arp is like many women artists; an over-looked Modernist artist whose prolific output and truly multi-disciplinary. Taeuber-Arp worked in mediums as diverse as metal work and needlepoint to drawing and dance across a career that traversed the early part of the twentieth century.