Back in Greece

We are back in Greece and it's wonderful being here. As usual, it took us a few days to get everything sorted but at last, we were able to go for our first swim.

The new planting between the main sea road and the beach is coming along nicely

The entrance to the 'Beach of the Sun'. It's a pay beach, but we go in free because we are residents.

A lot of steps to go down (and up!) - I counted them once, and I think it's 70?

The bourgainvillea not doing that well this year - maybe it's too early in the season.

The beach is packed every weekend (we abstain from coming then) and this lawn fills up with people on their loungers

And here we are, at last! I have missed this. It's 8:30 in the morning and there's not that many people about. Even so, we just manage to get the last umbrella and loungers on the front row which is what I like, 

so that I can look at the sea. It calms me so, it's like meditating.

In the distance, on the right hand corner you can see the marina

We do three short swims. It will take a while to build up to swimming to the net again, as we do every summer. You can see the net that surrounds our beach to stop boats coming in, in the horizon  (I should have zoomed in to take a close up of it). But, we will build up to it, as we do every year.

Zooming in on our left, I see a school bus.

By 11:00 when we leave, the beach is busy. But, nothing, like it will be by 1:00 and up to 8:00 in the evening. It's too busy for me, I like it when it's quiet 

 and here they are, the kids that came on the bus we saw.

There is a lot more to this beach than what I have shown here: there are three bars, one night club, exclusive areas for sitting which cost a lot more, play areas, and lots more. But, we just like swimming, and this is what we do.

Rachel Jones at the Courtauld

Rachel Jones at the Courtauld.

Just two works by Rachael Jones. We had just been to Somerset House to see the M. C. Escher exhibition and popped in at the Courtauld to see these two works as their vibrant colours appealed.

Jones made both same-titled works especially for their location at the Courtauld. She intended them to be in a playful and disruptive dialogue with the formality of the Courtauld's neoclassical building.

Rachel Jones, Struck, 2025, (oil sticks and oil pastel on linen)

Struck, 2025, (oil sticks and oil pastel on linen)

Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts (only two works)

I cannot do the Summer Exhibition at the R.A. It's too crowded, there are too many displays, and in order to see what the artwork is and by whom, you have to look in the catalogue. I just find it so frustrating and irritating. We went to see the Michaelina Wautier exhibition which was wonderful, and which I will post on soon, I hope. Ken wanted to look at the Summer Exhibition which he did while I did other things. He came out and talked to me about two artworks which he enjoyed, so I popped in, rushed through,  to have a look at just those two. 

Tim Shaw, Pin It on Them (Associated Artwork from the Installation: Shut it Piggy),  (old pillows and clothes on a steel frame)

Trump and Netanyahu, clasping hands, barbed wire around their wrists

standing on some of the devastation and destruction they have caused.

Michael Sandle, Vipera Palaestinae or Allegory of Consciencelessness in Gaza, (charcoal drawing)

Tony Blair, another facilitator of the genocide in Gaza.

 

Relativity Room at the M.C. Escher exhibition

Relativity Room at the M.C. Escher exhibition

at Somerset House.

The Relativity Room is a tiny fraction of the M.C. Escher exhibition. I do intend to post on the exhibition itself, but I am not sure when I will do so, as I am very behind with my blogging.

But, this was fun, so, because it's a short post, I thought I would do it now.

A small room, and you could either enter it with another person so that you could pose and see the contrast, or look through the window. We looked, marvelled and took photographs.

And, then, they changed places. Amazing.

We were not told how this is achieved, so I had to look it up. 

A relativity room is inded inspired by Escher's impossible architecture, and it achieves its mind-bending illusion by using forced perspective. 

The physics and architecture of the trick rely on a few specific design elements; the room is built with a steep gradient, so that the floor is skewd, it slopes upward; the ceiling is skewed too, sloping downwards so that when you walk from the 'low' side to the 'high' side of the room, you are actually walking closer to the ceiling. Furthermore, there is the checkerboard trick: the floor tiles are painted in a distorted grid: the grid gets smaller toward the far corner to reinforce the false sense of distance and make you believe you are further away.

Wonderful.

Art and Festival

Now that summer is here, there's so much going on in our area and it's hard fitting it all in. This was certainly the case last weekend. The three-week long Open Studios art exhibition in artists'  homes started last Saturday. We normally try to see as much as we can, but we are off to Greece tomorrow, so our only chance was last weekend. But, there was also a festival in Victoria Park, as well as Potfest in Compton Verney and the Thai Festival in Warwick. 

How to fit it all in?

This post is about what we did on the Saturday. 

We did not manage to see much of the work of local artists. I was also very disappointed that Rhoda Bertz did not exhibit this year, as she is my favourite local artist. This is the link to her 2022 exhibition but you can see more by using the search button on the right of this page.

This is what we did manage to see:

Sue Bent:

Her paintings are exhibited in her garden studio. Vibrant colours, domestic scenes with a focus on still life.

Arts, Eats and Treats Festival:

We then walked to Victoria Park for the Arts, Eats and Treats Festival. A new one for Leamington, so we were keen to see what it was like. It was fun, but we were a bit underwhelmed given that we had been to the Peace Festival the previous weekend.

cakes,

lots of vans serving hot food

drinks

I had not come across these before - they are water lily seeds which have been fried with different flavours. I tried some, they are not bad.

We wandered around for a while, then walked through the Pump Room Gardens and the Jephson Gardens, and got to:

St Nicholas House:

where various artists were exhibiting. I looked at the paintings of Janette George and the ceramics of Katherine Taylor.

We spent Sunday at Compton Verney looking at the work of the ceramic artists that were exhibiting at Potfest. 

We never made it to the Thai Festival. Next year maybe...