auf wiedersehen, wien!

three

Three years ago yesterday, I wrote my first post on Harika. I was sitting on the floor of my empty apartment in San Francisco, hours away from a flight to Istanbul, two bags packed and waiting. Today marks my third year here, and it's hard to believe all the experiences I've had, and all the wonderful people I've met.

So here's to bold decisions.
Here's to accepting the possibility of failure and disaster, and pushing through the fear.
Here's to taking a risk and going after everything you've dreamed of.

Thank you, my friends, for your continued support and kindness over these three years!

oh the many marvellous things

What a delight to find this sketch of a future exhibit taped up in a vitrine!
Reminds me of someone...

hello, venus

The auditorium was dark, and the white-headed professor was droning on and on about something my sleep deprived brain struggled to retain. I hung my head back to stare at the ceiling, trying to recall the bizarre dream I started to have last night, when my thought, like the dream, was interrupted. The slide had clicked to reveal a wonderfully rounded form— the very definition of round. A woman, head bowed, with enormous, pendulous breasts resting on a pillow of belly and hip. I was mesmerised.

The Venus of Willendorf.

I was obsessed. I drew her thighs and rolls in the corners of my art history and philosophy papers. I memorised her curves. This 25,000 year old Paleolithic statuette enchanted me. I daydreamed of the moment she was discovered in the earth, of her voluptuous little body being carved by ancient hands and gazed upon by ancient eyes... and I dreamt of tracing the shapes of her shadows with my own eyes.

Fifteen years later, I found myself standing before her, breath stilled in my body.
I pulled out my sketchbook and pen, and drew by the light which bounced off her breasts.



I am so lucky, indeed.

oh my thunderous heart!

Why on earth I did not spend every single day wandering through the ornate halls of Vienna's Naturhistorisches Museum is beyond me. It stands alongside The de Young in San Francisco, the Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston, and the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen, as one of my favourite museums. Oh wait— there is the Van Gogh Museum and...

But let's get back to Vienna. My goodness... this gem has everything a girl could want in a museum! Light! Elegant, gilded moulding! Fossils! Meteorites! Dinosaurs!



And then, there was the bird room...



Just look at all those corvids!



Can you believe such beings exist? I spent over two and a half hours sketching and gawking wide-eyed at everything within my sight. I was in love with the birds— to see elegant, feathered creatures I've only dreamed of (though stuffed), was such a thrill— to be able now, to better understand their size, colour and shapes...

But there was one thing— one little thing, which made my heart roar with excitement...
She deserves a post of her own.

der zustand liebe

gorgeous grotesque

beautiful bratislava

what can you do with an hour?

Why, you can take a train to Slovakia and begin to explore its marvellous capital, Bratislava!

flesh into stone

Muscles, flesh, and ribs, conquering heroes and goddesses...
One imagines their chests expand with inhalations at night.

anatomicalesque

Down in the belly of the Leopold Museum in Vienna, I discovered an artist I had never heard of— Hermann Nitsch. Nitsch is an Austrian artist best known for his controversial and often gorey multimedia and performance pieces, which explore ritual, religion and violence. Playing on screens in the gallery space, these bloody pieces were quite compelling (and a little nauseating), but what really caught my attention were his enormous, layered, anatomical drawings, which reminded me of the Lubos Plny exhibit I came across last year in Istanbul, with the layers of organs, lines and red. As you know, I go weak in the knees for a beautiful line, and my heart flutters for anatomical drawings and sculpture (once upon a time, I nearly entered the world of science and medicine), so Hermann Nitsch really spoke to me.



Just look at those layers of lines!

an untold story

I seem to have misplaced the envelope upon which I scrawled the artists' names... I remember it was in brown ink (the last image is Sleepless, by Paul Nestlang). Unimpressed by much of the work in The Excitement Continues exhibit at the Leopold Museum, these beautiful three really stood out and grabbed me— and don't you think they tell a story when placed together like this?

schiele's hands

There's a feeling you get inside when you stand in front of the work of an admired artist, and are finally able to examine the brushstrokes and smudges, the weight of a line, and the changes in direction in a bleed of colour. I have long been pulled toward the often grotesque, distorted figures of Egon Schiele, and as I stood in front of the Leopold Museum in Vienna, the cold reddening my nose, I felt a tremor in my chest, knowing that what I had studied in awe from books, would at last be a breath's distance away.

I felt submerged in a dark sea, muddy-coloured fish surrounding me, with piercing eyes— their elongated skeletal forms, twisting and coiling, erotic and disturbing. What captured me most were their hands— stretched, knobby-knuckled fingers like tree branches, so expressive, so real. The entire painting, held in these hands.