Aphra Behn - danger of eclectic shock

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St Paul’s trompe d’oeil

Posted by Aphra Behn on July 10, 2006

St Paul's trompe d'oeil

Too many words recently. By contrast here is a photograph I took on Saturday of St Paul’s Cathedral, complete with trompe d’oeil canvas covering the scaffolding while they do work on it.

It’s an art installation masquerading as responsible construction really, and I love the intelligence, sense of place and subversiveness of the thing.

5 Responses to “St Paul’s trompe d’oeil

  1. Agapanthus Says:

    That is a FANTASTIC photograph. Brilliant. Quite apart from the trompe d’oeil, the black-and-white and the diagonals make it look wonderfully unreal and stagey-in-a-good-way.

    I become immune to the visual strangeness (both self-conscious and accidental) of London sometimes. It’s good to have my eyes scrubbed clean from time to time.

  2. Aphra Behn Says:

    That’s kind of you Ag. I found the diagonal lines oddly upsetting too, in fact the whole thing has a mildly vertiginous feel, doncha think.

    AB

  3. Alfster Says:

    Superb photo. It took me a while to work out where you had taken the shot from. If that was up in April I walked around the back of St Pauls rather than the front and missed it!!!!!!!

    Darn-a-tee-darn!

  4. Phil Says:

    Looking across the river from the Tate Modern towards St Pauls on sunday I was struck on how flat the dome looked from there.
    Maybe the lighting, maybe the hangover, maybe the Kandinskys in the room I was looking from. Maybe the dome was flat and only I saw it.

    A nice picture and well spotted.

  5. Aphra Behn Says:

    Thankyou Alfster and Phil, and what a treat to see you both here. :-)

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