January 3.2009

We set off up Avenue Paulista. It is lined with amazing sky scrapers. The architecture is astonishing. Art made out of buildings. Many of the buildings were fully decorated for Christmas with swatches of fabric the height of the buildings. They looked like giant presents. And the decorations at ground level are out of this world: columns wrapped in blue and gold, a santa train, giant christmas trees. One big one that I found lovely was made out of huge metal shapes covered with crushed pop cans. This afternoon we wandered into one bank doorway and the entire mesanine was filled with small houses from different countries, each one decorated for christmas and with a life sized santa and mrs. claus. The balls on the ceiling were at least 8 feet in diameter and there were also a zillion stars in lights. In amongst the mechanical santas there were real people posing as mechanical.

I never know when something will catch my eye and I`ll have to dig out my camera. This morning I got a great shot of a reflection in wall/ceiling of two tables with different colours chairs and one woman eating was seen from the top of her head.

Also today we saw the biggest cultural book shop that you can ever imagine. Three architecturally stunning levels. Disappointing to me that everything was in Portuguese. Also in this complex called CAIXA we saw an exhibition of art by Inha Bastos, called Feminino. Her style is distinctive and reminisent of my potatoe people paintings. I loved the whimsy and the gentle consistency of this exhibition.

As usual, I have a hard time walking by an open church and so we found one to have a few minutes of quiet. The city is not really frenzied though. The traffic is respectful and nobody lays on their horns. It is safe to cross the road on a green walk signal. Much of the fast traffic must be on the highway that runs under Avenue Paulista! Everyone in Sao Paulo drives a tiny car and nobody hangs out of the buses holloring as in Bolivia.

Jim and I wandering into an amazing park across from the Museum of Art of Sao Paulo MASP.
This park was two city blocks of rain forest right in the city!! A high arched bridge spanned the road in the middle down below and it didn`t interfere with the park at all. It has been consistently raining or misty and that definitely added to the rain forest perseption.

The MASP gallery was just wonderful. Jim got in for free since he`s over 60. He`s 66 today!
The main exhibit was Virtue and Appearance (on the way to modernity). It was marvelous and huge and organized by theme rather than by time period, which made an interesting juxdapositon of images. All the big names were represented--Degas, Monet, Manet, Picasso, Da Vinci, Cezanne, Tintoretto, Rodin etc etc. They even had a Kath Kolwitz, the artist whose exhibit I loved while visiting Japan. Recently Jim found a book on her at our Truro Library and we book really enjoyed it. Its amazing how much of my current reading keeps popping into life. The recent biography of Leonardo Da Vinci that I read in Texas talked about his notebooks. Reproductions of these notebooks were on sale in the cultural bookshop in Sao Paulo.

After the Virtue and Appearance Exhibit, we went up to another floor for an exhibition of Chinese contemporary art. and then to the ground level for some Brazilian art.

Needless to say, we were very very hungery after all the walking and looking. I took Jim out for a birthday supper. Its a total crap shoot to order food from a Portuguese menu!