#13 - The sun never shines on Baltic square (+ logo for the blog)

If you have had any interest in this blog over the past two and a half weeks you will notice that theres a new logo logo up there. I like it alot. It looks better on my blogspot layout so if you're reading on tumblr have a look at that to see it's full beauty. It was created by my mate Jade Newton who is really talented at stuff like that. Check her out. Thank you Jade.

Two pictures again today. It's seems really hard to get a decent shot of places in the quayside with an instax. The first one was taken using 'normal, 3m-infinite' settings. The second with 'lighten, 3m-infinite'. Either buildings are really dark and the sky is nicely exposed or the buildings are nicely exposed and the sky is whited out. Maybe another day. So to make up for the average photos I thought I'd put two up.

Enough about cameras an' that. It was a nice sunny afternoon. The Baltic had more and new stuff in from the last time I visited. My favourite floor was probably Tomás Saraceno. He bloody loves spiders. He studied spiders for ages and created a massive (apparently pretty accurate) spiders web. There is a back room that informs you of how he went about creating it. Pretty impressive stuff.

Also exhibited was Cornelia Parker who squashed loads of instruments down in a press, hung them from the ceiling and lit them with one bright bulb in a fairly dim room. The result? loads of class shadows on the wall. In her other room was loads of amazingly interesting rubbish she had collected. Like fluff from the House Of Lords/Commons and a vinyl before it has been pressed.

The othet two floors were dedicated to John Cage. My impression of him from the information the Baltic provided me with was that he was a jack of all trades, talented man who liked making music but also loved mushrooms (he was a 'mushroom collector' according to Wikipedia). He managed to do 860 watercolours and drawings in what I worked out to be about 10 years. Pretty good going (thats around one every 4.2 days) even if some of them were pretty rubbish. Seems like a nice way to spent your later years. I also enjoyed that he was a big believer in 'silence' being defined as 'ambient noise'. Good lad.

The ground floor was full of peoples work who had carred on John Cage's ideas and created their own art with it. To me it just seemed like what John Cage would have made if he had layed off the mushrooms.

You should definately visit the Baltic while all this stuff is in. Worth a look.

p.s. The first Naughty Knitwear stalls are this Sunday. GET WARM.