Saturday, September 4, 2010

Sandham Memorial Chapel--and killer bunnies?

Sandham Memorial Chapel is of course, a memorial to the Great War, filled with murals by the war-artist Stanley Spencer. To be honest I wasn’t really a fan of Spencer’s work before coming here, but seeing it larger than life for me changed my perspective. His paintings are very detailed; I felt like I was playing Where’s Waldo, because every time I went through the paintings (I did several times) I found something new, almost as if I was seeing each one for the first time. I especially enjoyed the lighting—it was phenomenal! That was another reason I kept rotating through the pictures over and over again; there were no man-made lights inside, the building was solely illuminated from the natural light coming through the windows, so it would change every few minutes as clouds passed over or the sun caught a glimpse. The colors and the details would change with the changing light, almost as if the scenes were alive, moving and going about their day to day things as we were watching. In some ways it reminded me of photographs in the Harry Potter series—a picture, but not a stationary picture, something different every time you look.




Outside the chapel is the field where Watership Down takes place/is filmed--I myself have no idea what that is, but several of the girls did. They said it was a kids book/movie with killer bunnies and whatnot--sounds pretty cool to me.

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