Flying off to Sydney

We got up at 5am and were off by 6 on our way to Melbourne Airport.  We had packed all the spare food into the suitcase but discovered when we got there that we were over the 20kg weight limit. So we jettisoned some food and with judicious juggling to make the hand luggage up to the maximum 7kg allowed, we just made the weight limit. 

It was only a couple of hours on the flight and we were arriving in Sydney. Walking up the road to the hotel, I was taken with a lot of the Victorian cast iron balconies.  All very intricate and a wide variety of styles.  There were a lot of these balconies in Melbourne too.  Thinking about it, I've not seen these in the Victorian parts of London where I've worked, but I wonder whether most of them were salvaged as scrap metal during WW2 and used to build aeroplanes. 

We made our way to the hotel, dumped the luggage and took ourselves off to the NSW art gallery.  There we found a Picasso exhibition, which had travelled from Paris.  Apparently when Picasso died, there were massive death duties, and the family paid them by giving all his works from his studio to the State Art Gallery.  One of the quotes of Picasso on display expressed the sentiment "the greatest collector of Picasso, is Picasso".  There was a lot of his work on display, from his blue period, to the rose period, to cubism, collage and constructivism, classicism and surrealism.  There were pictures of quite a few of his lovers. I can't say any of his work is to my taste, but I'm starting to understand how to look at cubist paintings now, and find them quite interesting.  I did like his lithographs and etchings that were on display, particularly the series of the bull as it moved from representational to symbolic.