We went to London recently for a weekend, and took these shots. You can see more here:
http://flickr.com/photos/scottrhodes/sets/72157605536822651/Whilst there we went to
Dennis Severs house on Folgate street in Spitalfields.
It was a truly amazing experience, ( you can not take photos inside though.)
I cannot compare it to anything else, it was like walking into a living old master painting or opera setting.
It is definitely not a museum or an art exhibition, but like walking back in time.
You enter the house in silence (no mobile phones thank god) and it is like the inhabitants have just left. Lit by candlelight, and fires in the grate, half eaten food is left, reading glasses and glasses of sherry. Your imagination is key here, and the more you let go to your senses, the more magical it is. The house is full of beautiful detail, but it is the
feeling you have which is more important than any one thing. One might say - "oh this is the wrong century, in the wrong place" if one were trying to be 'clever', but this is missing the point entirely - it is not about seeing, but about
soul and your feelings to it. Rather like Christmas itself.
I didn't want to leave, but wanted to sit for a while in that room with the large Christmas tree chatting to an imagined elderly aunt drinking tea, and eating those little cakes left out. As you go up a floor, you go forward in time until you reach the attic inhabited by Scrooge himself. Another room animates a Hogarth painting that you see on the wall of drunken men, you see a knocked over chair in the painting, and notice its real counterpart in the room.
Going back down, I lingered for a while in the rooms I'd passed through taking in the smells and looking round in awe and wonder one last time. This really was and unforgettable and magical experience and surely counts as a unique work of art, and true art is what I would call it, (though its creator Dennis Sever himself was hostile at any classification)
http://www.dennissevershouse.co.uk/#
