Monday, November 15, 2010

Rainy Day Beauty

It's been a dull and rainy day today in Sydney, fluctuating between drizzle and downpour it essentially hasn't relented all day. As a consequence I've been relentlessly sedentary all day. It was the least I could do. The most active thing I did was get started on knitting a new scarf for myself, while I watched Season 4 episodes of Mad Men or surfed the web.

While I was surfing the web I came across a fantastic UK website choc full of visual arts and design collections, VADS: an online visual arts resource. Wow. Designed as an educational resource it is a compendium of collections owned by various educational institutions. I'm still trawling through the thousands and thousands of images, but some of my early favourite collections are:

The British Library's Russian Visual Arts, 1814 - 1909 collection.


Zhar-ptitsa’ by Polenova, Elena Dmitrievna, (1850-1898)


I'm also loving two of the London College of Fashion's collections, firstly the Woolmark collection.


Hardie Amies, 1956.


Chloe, 1966.


Secondly, the awesome Paper Patterns collection.


McCalls, 1936.


Vogue, 1957.


Next I plan on staring open mouthed at the loveliness in the Central St Martins Museum & Study collection, the The Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (Medieval Stained Glass in Great Britain) collection and the Charles Rennie Macintosh's Northern Italian Sketchbook collection. To name just a few...

2 comments:

Ur-spo said...

hurrah !
I went away for a few days, and came back to see you posting; I am pleased as punch.

The Other Andrew said...

Thanks Dr Spo! It's nice to be back.