Small Details
One of my favourite pastimes is to visit art museums and focus on the small details in a painting. A pearl bracelet dangling from a wrist. A lace ruffle on a sleeve. A jewel-encrusted ring. Thick impasto paint to suggest stiff brocade. Daubs of white to indicate...
The Scattergun Approach
I’ve been jumping around like a jackrabbit when it comes to reading during the past year. One week I’m delving into The Europeans by Henry James then I’m switching centuries to read about modern-day émigrés in Janice Lee’s The Expatriates. I burrow into Renaissance...
Architectural Gems: Past and Present
…the tarnished nameplate fixed to the wall: Begijnhof Sint-Catharine. Passing a gatehouse, they emerge into a large courtyard. Brick buildings on all sides rise three-storeys high, each façade decorated with crow-stepped gables, typical of sixteenth-century houses of...