Chagall at the AGO

 Last week I embarked on a little adventure with a couple of girlfriends. We took the GO bus to Toronto and went to the Art Gallery of Ontario. Footloose and fancy free in the big city.... Woohoo!

 The aim was to see the current exhibition of paintings by Marc Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde, on loan from Le Centre Pompidou, Paris.

I had seen the twelve magnificent stained glass windows that Chagall had designed for the Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem when I was there a few years ago, so I was interested to see his paintings too.

Chagall's "Blue Circus".“For me, a circus is a magic show that appears and disappears like a world. A circus is disturbing. It is profound.”
“I can still see in Vitebsk, my hometown, in a poor street with only three or four spectators, a man performing with a little boy and a little girl. Clowns, bareback riders and acrobats have made themselves at home in my visions. Why? Why am I so touched by their makeup and their grimaces? With them I can move toward new horizons. Lured by their colours and makeup, I dream of painting new psychic distortions. Alas, in my lifetime I have seen a grotesque circus: a man [Hitler] roared to terrify the world.”

“I wish I could hide all these troubling thoughts and feelings in the opulent tail of a circus horse and run after it, like a clown, begging for mercy, begging to chase the sadness from the world.”   

— Marc Chagall, 1966

The exhibition followed how Chagall’s Russian heritage influenced his art, and even though he spent much of his life in France, and even lived in the USA during WW2, his painting style reflected his Russian roots. There were 32 works by Chagall and eight works by Kandinsky. After seeing the Chagall exhibit, we wandered around a maze of more galleries, eventually finding ourselves in the Galleria Italia, designed by Toronto-born architect Frenk Gehry.

The Galleria Italia was part of Gehry's 2008 revitalisation of the AGO and is a glass and wood facade that spans 180m (590') along Dundas Street It was named in recognition of a $13million contribution by 26 Italian-Canadian families of Toronto. Stunning!

There's so much more to see at the AGO. I can see another visit in my future.

Wot I Bin Up To

I seem to have been missing from Blogland for the past couple of weeks. Did you miss me? No? oh, well....

I haven't been anywhere exciting, or done anything really blogworthy, just living life as it comes along I suppose. Which is what most people do.

I've been baking bread....

... and last week my former clock repairing neighbour paid me a visit to have a look at William's movement.... William refuses to tick. He got William started, but the clock won't run for more than 20 minutes, and now he won't tick at all. I'm hoping for a return visit from my neighbour. He told me his father was a clockmaker and he grew up in a house with 60 clocks!

Rehearsals are in full swing for the annual Christmas Variety Show. This is the third Christmas we've put on this kind of event at our local theatre.

 I've been making props for the Blacklite version of The Nutcracker.... here's my Sugar Plum Fairy.

 And of course I've been spending plenty of time looking after these naughty little people.....

 ... and tickling these.

 Aren't I lucky?

It's a Zoo Out There!

I wish Hallowe'en had been invented when I was growing up in England, it seems that it would be so much fun to get dressed into a scary costume and go knocking on doors and being given candy and chips.... but we had Guy Fawkes Night instead, where we went knocking on doors asking "Penny for the Guy" and then building an effigy of poor old Guy Fawkes using some of dad's old clothes and then burning him at the stake (Guy Fawkes not dad) on a huge bonfire on November 5. And of course, that was Fireworks Day too. My birthday is the day before Guy Fawkes Day, so I always had my fireworks a day early at my party. I thought I was so special!

For Hallowe'en Callum was a giraffe, Isaac was a green dragon, Baby Max was a beaver (how Canadian is that?) and his sister Baby Emma was the good fairy keeping an eye on the proceedings.... sorry, you can't really see her wings in this picture, but she definitely had them.

The giraffe spent a lot of time chasing the dragon round the kitchen......

.....but the dragon managed to elude capture by roaring loudly and breathing fire on the giraffe. And laughing.