So, for a destination blogger, it is currently impossible not to know about Skrunda-2, as everyone seems to be blogging about it, so I thought I’d better go and check it out, too…
… it’s an abandoned, over-grown town, where nature is reclaiming what man has cast aside…
… something I really liked about this build is that it feels like contemporary abandonment, it feels like a real abandoned town, not a post-apocalyptic build, you don’t expect to see any zombies here, just wild animals…
… there is a lot of wonderful wall art, here…
… which adds to the contemporary feel of the place…
… plus equally wonderful sculptural art, in hidden places…
… I spent a good couple of hours here, it’s a very engaging build, with far too many photogenic opportunities for one post.
I visited Nostalgia Falls, today. One of the first things you see at the landing point is a huge, steaming locomotive, seemingly trapped in place by massive spider webs… just past that, at the dock, is a fairly hefty fishing boat, also stuck in place by large webs… I told myself I really didn’t want to run into those spiders…
… heading away from the dock, things become far less gloomy…
… in fact, they become stunningly autumnal…
… really pretty…
… with the prettiest planet in our system suspiciously close to Earth, in the sky…
… there are gorgeous little scenes, wherever you look…
… there’s a lot crammed into this little sim, I just got hooked on the autumnal gorgeousness, but there’s a little village, tombs, a carousel, a bombed out building…
… and a big old house full of ghoulish critters. In front of that house is a graveyard, and the ubiquitous post-apocalyptic playground, complete with bleeding zombie girl. Plenty to keep your camera snapping, and all very nicely blended together.
I spent the morning installing a new exhibition at Placebo Gallery. The exhibition is called ‘Imaginary Landscapes’, and consists of my eight latest works, where I have further explored one of my favourite themes, landscapes created from textures…
… although there are actual RL landscape elements incorporated in my textures, most are not landscape elements, in themselves, rather, they are photographs of concrete, sand, plants, clouds, rust, timber… all blended and mixed and reblended, till I weave them into these wonderful, rich, fantasy landscapes…
… they are landscapes from my mind, distant shores of the imagination, where you might find the ruins of civilisations vanished millennia ago…
… places where there are three suns and five moons…
… where there may be life, but not as Jim would know it…
… places you could spend the rest of your years exploring, not quite sure how you arrived there, in the first place. Something about looking at some pictures in a gallery?
Today I visited The Land of Thor, specifically to look at an exhibition in the Midgard Gallery, that Inara Pey had recently blogged about…
… the images in this exhibition are some of the freshest, truely delightful works I have seen in SL for a long time…
… really sweet whimsy…
… wonderfully engaging imagery that manages to totally avoid the cliched feel of a lot of this type of work I see in SL…
… I really loved all the rabbi-centric (my own word (: ) images in this exhibition…
… upstairs was an equally fresh set of work based on J G Ballard’s, then, ground-breaking novel ‘Crash’…
… if you’ve ever read the book, you’ll see the connection. However, having found ‘Crash’ to be Ballard’s least engaging novel, I find these works to be a much less grim depiction of the theme… if you didn’t know they were a homage to the eroticisation of auto-accident injuries, you’d find them quite joyous.
I visited the Vordun Museum and Gallery, last evening. I haven’t been here since their ‘Floating World’ exhibition, some time last year, or possibly even the year before. The Vordun is a very elegant gallery, very much like an RL ‘High Art’ gallery. The only thing I don’t like about it is the fact they force a HUD on you, as you enter… there’s no request, it’s just forced on you, and I find this gross lack of etiquette to be strangely at odds with the otherwise very sophisticated environment. I find it so invasive and irritating that I instantly remove it and anything it may have had to offer me, so, in that respect, it’s totally counterproductive of them to force it on me in the first place. Ok, I just needed to say that…
… the gallery is beautifully designed, the spaces are mostly quite intimate, and wonderfully visual…
… by which I mean the spaces themselves are visual, not just the art works that are in them…
… the works are displayed on various, perfectly coloured walls, with excellent lighting…
… the works are all old masters. You can buy many of them in the gallery shop, so I’m assuming they are all in the ‘Creative Commons’, otherwise selling them would be copyright infringement… I’ve seen plenty of that, as far as selling ‘Art’ goes, in SL, but would assume a gallery as obviously dedicated to a ‘High Art’ aesthetic as the Vordun, wouldn’t be selling work it shouldn’t be selling…
… the art works themselves are gorgeous reproductions, with deep, rich colours…
… there is a wide variety of mediums, from oils, to woodblock and etching…
… and even paired themes, like above, where there is a display of works depicting people playing instruments, alongside a beautiful display of classical and Renaissance instruments.
I visited The Lost Unicorn Gallery today, to check out the new work there. As always, the work is excellent. Many of these have gorgeous clothing on the models as a feature…
… really pretty, lush gowns…
… I loved this one’s Pre-Raphaelite style and palette…
… and this is simply beautiful in every way…
… this appealed for it’s palette, but also because I’m silly for felines…
… this was probably my favourite…
… and I loved the lighting in this one. These are just a few of the new works there, well worth a visit, as it always is.
I visited Idun, today. This is a sci-fi planet sim, with mostly sci-fi structures set in an otherwise untouched wilderness. The structures are great, nicely done. They get more prevalent as you climb higher from the landing point. It wasn’t the structures that stole my attention, though, it was the gorgeous scenery…
… and the wonderful sky. From the highest points, this scenery is panoramic and beautiful…
… but it was the lower landscape that I really loved. Everywhere you look, there are stunning scenes of the far distance framed by the near landscape…
… and above it all, that gorgeous sky. I explored what I think was every nook, down here…
… taking hundreds of photos…
… till I finally came to the ocean. It was incredibly restful, down here, with the waves washing onto the shore.
Today I visited Cica Ghost’s latest creation, Planet. As I’ve said, previously, I have always had an ambiguousness about my reactions to Cica Ghost’s work, sometimes liking it, sometimes not…
… I really like this one. For some reason, this one feels different to me. It still has all the Cica Ghost tropes…
… but they seem fresher, in ‘Planet’, as though some subtle evolution has taken place…
… which is hardly a surprise, given how prolific she’s been recently…
… the thing that has always caused my ambivalence toward her work is that I’ve always found her creatures to be on the creepy side of cute… I found them too unsettling to be enjoyable…
… I don’t feel that with the critters in ‘Planet’, they are suddenly likeable, which, for me, gives them far more depth, and makes the whole work a comfortable experience, not an unsettling one…
… I also particularly like the sky here…
… it has an ‘epic’ quality, it makes me think of 1950’s Chinese and Russian propaganda poster backgrounds.
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