Churches in Venice

My favorite work of art on the NC Museum of Art hiking trail is this one: Cloud Chamber for the Trees and Sky by British artist Chris Drury. I love visiting this magical little place. Not only does it look like some kind of enchanted fairy home, get this....it's a huge pinhole camera!

There are benches inside - you go in, shut the door, and sit there for a while to let your eyes adjust to the darkness. And then the pinhole in the roof turns the whole place into a camera and inverts an image of the sky onto the walls and floors of the chamber.

Even better....it's different every time you visit it, depending on the time of year, the position of the sun, the density of the leaves in the forest. Sometimes you see the shadows of the clouds, other times the trees. One time, a perfect laser-like beam of light streamed in through the pinhole, and my nephews went wild (it reminded them of Indiana Jones).

The boys entering the Cloud Chamber~

It doesn't look that big, but I can stand up easily inside, and there's room for at least 8 people or so on the benches~

Here it is in winter, without the green weedy stuff growing on the roof~

The artist's website: Land Artist, Working with Nature. He's built cloud chambers all over the world, but mainly in Europe. We are so lucky to have one here in NC!

From his website:

A large preoccupation in my work has been the exploration of what inner and outer nature mean. These cloud chambers are still, silent, meditative and mysterious spaces. They are often built underground, so that in these dark spaces what is outside is brought in and reversed. Clouds drift silently across the floor.

This week's PhotoHunt theme is "Sparkles"

Fun theme! All of these pics were taken in Venice. The first three show Venice's sparkling blue Christmas lights, and the last one is a shop window (you can see one of the blue lights reflected in the glass).

You can find more Photo Hunters and join the hunt here.

Thanks for visiting and have a great weekend.

Another sculpture I love in the NC Museum of Art park, this one is Gyre by artist Thomas Sayre. This thing is so monumentally huge and is visible from so many different parts of the park, and it changes shape depending on where you are. There are spotlights shining on it at night and it looks very cool; next time I'm over there for a concert, I'll get a photo of that.

A few more sculptures from the NCMA park~

Collapse I by South African artist Ledelle Moe. This sculpture makes me want to lay down in the grass and take a nap. :)

And then deep in the woods, an untitled work by the same artist. It's meant to represent a human figure rolled up in a ball, but the boys used it as as opportunity to act out the scene when Indiana Jones escapes from the huge rolling boulder. Interactive art!

This week's PhotoHunt theme is "Bubbles."

Another fun theme and not too hard since I remembered taking these fish pond photos. The building reflected in the water is my local garden supply store.

You can find more Photo Hunters and join the hunt here.

Thanks for visiting and have a great weekend.

Some various and sundry details about the bell towers of Venice.

The campanile di San Marco is the tallest of them all, of course, at 315 feet (97 meters). Second place is a tie between the Frari and San Francesco della Vigna ; both of these towers rise to 224 feet (69 meters). The Venetian nickname for the San Marco tower is “el paron de casa” which means “master (or lord) of the house.”

Santa Maria della Salute has two towers (photo below), but only one of them has bells in it. You can listen to these beautiful bells on Trek Capri’s blog!

Most every church has some bells even if they no longer have a tower. Many churches have what’s called a “Roman-style” bell tower – not a free-standing campanile but visible bells in a little tower usually on the roof of the church. The bells in the photo below are from the Rialto church of San Giacometto, which used to have a free-standing tower that was destroyed in a 1514 fire.

This week's PhotoHunt theme is "Six."

Tough theme this week - I had to look through the archives for quite a while before I found this photo with six bales of hay in a field. This is a very typical sight when you drive through rural North Carolina (developers, stay away!).

You can find more Photo Hunters and join the hunt here.

Thanks for visiting and have a great weekend.

This week's PhotoHunt theme is "Purple."

Hard choice because I had lots of possibilities for this theme. Decided to go with this purple flower on an artichoke~

You can find more Photo Hunters and join the hunt here.

Thanks for visiting and have a great weekend.

The North Carolina Museum of Art has a fantastic collection of Italian art, with a number of works that take me to Venice every time I go to Raleigh to visit the museum. A while back, I wrote about the Canaletto Capriccio painting in the collection; here are a few more.

This lovely Madonna and Child in a Landscape is by Cima da Conegliano, painted around 1499 while the artist was living in Venice. This painting was featured on a US Christmas stamp in 1993.

Veronese's The Baptism of Christ, painted in 1550-60~

The Grand Canal at the Palazzo Foscari, painted in 1740 by Michele Marieschi~

This over-the-top painting makes me laugh every time I see it. It's The Triumph of Venice, painted in 1737 by Pompeo Girolamo Batoni. A female figure representing Venice is driving the chariot pulled by two winged lions. Next to her is Renaissance doge Leonardo Loredan surrounded by a huge crowd of Roman Gods. You can glimpse the Palazzo Ducale in the background.