This morning I visited ‘The 22 Art Space in Bellisseria‘, to check out the new exhibition ‘Duet’. I won’t offer an opinion about this exhibition, I’ll let you decide for yourself, should you choose to come and see it. My artistic tastes are predicated on those of my human, of course… my human has a degree in Computer Graphic Design. Like many people trained in design, the human’s taste in art is lowbrow/populist/illustrative, not highbrow/elitist… I feel this exhibition is aimed at the highbrow, capital ‘A’, art elite, and therefore I am not a suitable judge of the work or its meaning. I’m sure Ricco won’t be offended by my saying this, and will continue to send me exhibition updates! While I was there, however, I also checked out, as I always do, the amazingly uniform, stunningly well presented neighbourhood the gallery is in…

… forgive my naïveté, but this place has always intrigued me with it’s glorious, wealthy, suburban charm. I often speculated on how it was so uniform, supposing there must be some kind of building covenant, or constraints… you see, although I have always been a ‘premium’ member, I have also always only ever lived in the unregulated wilds of ‘Mainland’, and never felt the need to deplete my land usage ability by getting a Linden Home…

… it wasn’t till I visited ‘Mirror Pond‘, a few days ago, after reading this article, by Daniel Voyager, that a seed was sown for a revelation about the suburban paradise around the 22 Art Space. When I first landed in Mirror Pond (literally… you land IN the pond), I thought ‘Wow, what a pretty sim, so uniform and well set out’…

… but, as I wandered around it, miles and miles of it, all exactly the same, it started looking less amazing, and, actually, well… bland and repetitive, though still pretty…

… back in Bellisseria, which is slightly less repetitive, I suddenly realised ‘This is all Linden Homes, too!’… I clicked on a house and, sure enough, it was a Linden Home, they all were. And, like ‘Mirror Pond’, and all it’s neighbouring sims, this place just goes on and on, all lovely and tidy and well-manicured… all, really, the same. There is hardly any sign of individual expression, here… the odd flag on a building, but almost nothing else…

… mile after mile of pretty, perfect homes and sections on perfect, empty streets of lovely pavers…

… as I said, forgive my ignorance if all this was perfectly obvious to you from the start, but I am a child of the SL wilds, where the beautiful and the ugly and tasteless, as well as just miles of abandoned land, side by side, is the norm. I hadn’t realised it, but I far prefer the expressions of individuality I’ve always seen there, to this candy-coated, safe, suburban blandness.

I returned, after several months, to Missing Melody, last evening…

… the place was even more beautiful, but darkly so, now…

… but dark in a hauntingly lovely way. There are lots of animals here, and several gorgeous little tableau, like a baby fox cautiously sniffing at a sleeping bambi, a bambi cautiously looking at a sleeping fox, this one of an adult deer nuzzling a fawn, and several others, they are all delightful, and make the leaning toward darkness a cosy leaning, rather than a melancholy one…

… the autumn colours are glorious…

… here, a mother bear has caught a fish for her cub…

… there are areas where it is constantly raining and lightning flashes…

… like I said, kinda dark, but not maudlin…

… above everything is this wonderfully brooding sky.

I visited Drune Gotham, last night. The place is a delicious confection of rich, velvety darkness and equally rich light and colour…

… there is wonderful 1920’s-era signage everywhere…

… the whole place has a stunningly well developed alt-20’s feel…

… if you know me, you know I’m not into RP, I’m all about photographing the environment. This iteration of Drune is billed as an RP sim, which might mean it will be up for a while? There were several avi’s here when I was here, but they all seemed to be milling around in the landing area… there are plenty of little, hidden spaces to explore, too, but they were all empty. The feeling of this area, like it had just been deserted…

… had a definite ‘Silent Hill’ vibe, for me. All the interiors are beautifully rendered…

… back outside, and the ‘Silent Hill’ vibe was displaced by the ‘Batlight’ in the sky, and marvellous Bettie Page…

… as with all the ‘Drune’ iterations, the sumptuous lighting and textures are impeccable…

… and the Deco interiors exquisite.

I recently visited Waterfalls of Dreams…

… what a very pretty place!…

… the eponymous waterfalls are several…

… but it was the flora and the light that bedazzled me the most…

… the light is constantly shifting, here. You can literally take two pictures a second apart, and the lighting in them will be totally different…

… almost everything here that is lit, or emits light, has been set to cycle through its colours… that and the rapidly changing sky create a constantly shifting scene light. This isn’t jarring, though, in fact it is surprisingly subtle…

… but once you become aware of it, it can be hard to choose a ‘better’ image of a single scene, as that scene, photographed several times in a row, is always differently lit…

… which just meant I took hundreds of pictures, which is pretty normal for me, anyway (:

I went to Nelipot, this morning…

… it was an autumnal wonderland…

… with plenty of scope for minimalist photos…

… with lots of gorgeous sky…

… but there are plenty of trees and buildings and landscape for more object-filled images…

… but, as always, it’s the big sky and horizon line that draws me.

It was raining when I visited Luane’s World, this morning, raining and misty and autumnal…

… the rain cleared, though, and everything was fresh and clean, and the light was soft and beautiful…

… I hung out, for a while, on a small jetty, observed by gulls…

… before resuming my wandering. The colours and scenery here put me in mind of American Romantic Landscape paintings…

… and, depending on view angle, Maxfield Parrish paintings…

… this is a really beautiful sim for nature photography…

… and just, generally, delightfully pastoral/bucolic scenes…

… I loved it, here, just wandering and stopping to take pictures. There were lots of other avi’s doing the same thing, some on horses, one on some fabulous lion-like beast… all were courteous and considerate, there were no assholes, which is always lovely (:

I just visited Seiiki. What beautiful place! My first impression was how much I loved the lighting… not only is it wonderfully dramatic, but the clouds are static. For someone who often spends a lot of time getting the best cloud action in the background of her images, static clouds are marvellous…

… there’s lots of pretty foliage here, too…

… there’s so much to see, here, this post is only a fraction of the pictures I took. I love all the steps, they often made me feel like I was in a ‘TombRaider’ game…

… there are marvellous vistas to see from all the high places…

… and wonderfull little places to discover…

… the detail is excellent…

… I’m always impressed by how much time and focus something like this must take to create…

… and equally impressed that someone had the vision and drive to actually manifest such a magical place.

I have just set up a new exhibition in my gallery, called ‘Changes’…

… there’s no deep meaning to the title, simply that it felt like time for some…

… if you are familiar with my work/style, you’ll know that, over the years, it has gone through a few changes, and they usually look nothing like what I have done previously…

… these new works are, for me, a fresh breeze of change…

… and I like them very much…

… change is good.

I spent several hours in ‘Shady Shopping District‘, today…

…this has to be the prettiest post-apocalyptic build in SL…

… and, by far, one of the most interesting shopping environments…

… some kind of weirdness has happened here, perhaps decades ago, leaving most buildings in ruin, and giant, frozen octopus tentacles coming out of the ground…

… whatever it was happened so long ago, the ruins are long over-run by vegetation. There are little golden motes sparkling in the air, I trusted my alien physiology to protect me from them if they were actually spores, but still found them pretty…

… all is glorious decay…

… my only gripe about the place is the scream-inducing lag which, at it’s worst, was as bad as the, for me, benchmark horror sim lag at ‘Tralala’s Diner‘. It was this lag that was the cause of me staying here for more than three hours, just turning around could result in me getting hopelessly lost, so I had to do things over and over till I got where I wanted to be, and any impatience resulted in catastrophe. Most photos are not the ones I was looking at when I clicked the shutter, but the ones I got seconds later, when the sim reality caught up with my intentions…

… still, it’s a gorgeous sim, and there are several wonderful stores to be discovered if you have the fortitude to battle the lag.

As is my wont, when all the SL destinations become dully the same, and I want to go somewhere that isn’t a music club/enchanted forest/relaxing beach, I open my saved landmarks and start running through places I’ve been over the years, deleting the no longer extant ones…

… I always find somewhere fabulous I’d forgotten about…

… this time I found ‘Alpha.tribe‘, somewhere I visited so long ago, I don’t even remember doing it…

… I found a gorgeously surreal dreamscape…

… with a stunning sky…

… and mysterious flying saucers. What more could a girl ask for?