the list’s the thing

Art, Photo Essay, Uncategorized, , , , , ,

The Poetry of List-Making

For this week’s Discover Challenge from WordPress we are asked by Erica to explore the artistic side of list-making.

“Using the list form as your foundation, turn it into something unexpectedly beautiful.”

This seems the perfect excuse for another dip into my prized Journal from our Italian travels in 1999, which you may remember accompanied the Italian series of paintings last year during my Studio 365 day challenge.

Journal

Writing the journal at the end of each day became a labor of love. Each list of the day’s activities took on a life of its own, and as I look back through it again today memories of those lovingly documented moments come flooding back, which explains why the journal became the subject of my post for another Discover Challenge in April: Memory…

lists i

…the surgical instruments designed by Giovanni Alessandro Brambilla in the Museo Galileo in Florence…

list ii

….meeting Alessandro Menghini in the medieval garden he had designed in  Perugia, which he describes in his book Il Giardino Dello Spirito…

list iv

…and the welcome gelati break in the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, lying in the warm afternoon sun.

list iii

But perhaps the most important lists of all from our trip were to be found in the train timetable book from Italian Railways, which became our bible as we travelled across this most beautiful of countries.

Definitely time for a return visit I think…maybe next year 🙂

10 comments

  1. Oh how beauteous that book is …. A real treasure of a journal. It is something that saddens me that we move further and further away from keeping the beautiful diaries if our forebears (by we, I don’t mean US by the way – I embrace my inner Luddite daily and write in my journal in fountain pen though not accompanying with skilled water colours ). When my mother in law (a writer) died she left instructions that each of her children have one of her ‘Common Place’ books …. These were not her diaries (she also diligently kept those) but books of random entries, thoughts, starts of works, bits of inspiration cut or torn from here or there. I was inspired to do the same and can report that all my daughters have followed suit. I ramble – the main point is that YOUR journal is a beautiful thing in its own right …. Thank you for sharing some of it 🙂

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    1. Thanks Osyth. The journal really is one of my greatest treasures. As to your journal, written daily in fountain pen, (btw I wonder how many millennials know what that is?) will you be publishing it any time soon in the footsteps of Pepys? Welcome back to this side of the pond. 🙂

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