Magdalen College Tower

Crowd at 5 am May Day



Morris Dancers

Maypole

Kelmscott Manor

William Morris' country estate (or farm)

tea before the tour

Tour of Oxford

Morris and Co. window (Burne-Jones)

Prior Park

sketching

wild garlic

Fielding's House, on the way down the hill from Prior Park. We'd just read a selection from his novel Tom Jones!

Glastonbury

Climbing Glastonbury Tor

At the top of the Tor

Looking out from the top of the Tor

At Glastonbury Abbey, purported burial place of King Arthur

Herb garden at Glastonbury Abbey

Soya Hirano -- Some of my random drawings

I'm afraid that all of my drawings are unclear by pencils or/and color pencils and incomplete because I'm so slow at drawing.

No.1 (left), April 24th, Bath Abbey ...While having dinner in front of a cafe, Andrew and I enjoyed a view of this abbey. This is my first sketch in the trip.



No.2 (right), April 25th, A Taxi Running on Broad Street in Bath, Drawn While I was Sitting in Front of the Pub Named "The Slug and Lettuce" ...Btw, before the pub I enjoyed eating dinner and sketching the street and afterwards moved in the pub and had a first and last glass of a cocktail named Sex on the Beach with five students of Hiram College.

No.3 (left), April 26th, Tintern Abbey (Ruin) in Chepstow

...The left wall seems to incline to the right, but that's my technical mistake in drawing. I should have drawn the wall perpendicular to the bottom of the sketch page. The stone abbey had apparently cleaned of plants off the walls when our study abroad group visited because it looks different from paintings of it by Edward Dayes in 1794 and by Thomas Girtin about 1793.

No.4 (right), April 28th, Palladian (neo-classical) Bridge in Alexander Pope's Prior Park in Bath ...This bridge illustrates Alexander Pope's achievement of fitting a human architectural work into the environment of the forest, pond, and grassy slope. The neoclassic bridge idealizes the British aristocratic artist and writer's peaceful landscape of balance between nature and civilization. No gold or marble overwhelms the order, as Pope would wish.

No.5 (left), April 29th, A Corner of Keble College Made of Brick in the Victorian Architectural Style in Oxford ...Founded in 1870, the mosaic and polychromatic brickwork of the outer walls of Keble College (one independent educational institution of Oxford University) was designed by William Butterfield (1814-1900) and reflects a Christianity theme of exaltation to the heaven. I think, our tour guide said that John Ruskin (I'm not sure if it was Ruskin, though, but somebody did for sure) decried Butterfield's brickwork design, but many people still liked it. More information may be found on http://www.keble.ox.ac.uk/about/architecture. Due to my rough delineation of the building, I did not draw a correct number of the black squares on both sides of the triangular roofs. I am glad that I am not drawing this for a stringent architecture or drawing course that would dislike such inaccuracy.

No.6 (right), April 30th, Drawn from the Picture of William Morris' Medieval/Naturalist-Style Bedroom in a Pamphlet of Kelmscott Manor in Gloucestershire
...Reportedly Morris' second daughter May Morris (and maybe his wife Jane, too?) embroidered on the bed sheet and bed curtain, even though my drawing only shows a small part of her dedication for William's 60th birthday present. No pictures were allowed in the manor. I was a bit surprised by the fact that Jane Morris had a separate bedroom from her husband's, but our guide explained why briefly: her liaison with Dante G. Rossetti was no less shocking to her husband than her confession that she had never loved William Morris.

Gwen Lash - So Long, Farewell

Tomorrow we head for home. It is a little sad and a bit of a relief. Spending two and a half weeks with twenty three people, who at the beginning were little more than complete strangers, is a little rough. At times we wanted to throttle each other and at others we may have felt that we couldn't be closer, but now that draws to an end. The time we have spent here has been wonderful; the friendships we have made and the knowledge we have gained will stay with us for the rest of our... well, to be honest... awhile. They will stay for us for as long as it is important and for as long as we can find the journals we wrote and souvenirs we bought. In class-related terms I can honestly say that I will never look at a public garden in the same way again. I can now see what ideals are reflected in the gardens and social commentary they contain. Now I can also tell in what period of time the garden was created or at least what time it was imitating and which details indicate what; the same goes for architecture. However, Morris' ideas and his followers are the main thing I will take away. The Arts and Crafts movement I find to be a very compelling lifestyle. The ideas that all things we use in our lives should be beautiful and all things we find beautiful should be useful. The blurred line between art and craft is more important than I think we realize. It influences our choices in almost everything, for our homes and and our lives.

Karen Cover

On Thursday, May 6th, Sara and I spent our free day visiting the town where Jane Austen (1775-1817) lived during her later life. It took us a little over an hour and only moderate confusion to get from London to Alton by train, and we arranged for a taxi to take us a few miles from Alton Station to her house in the small village of Chawton.
The two places we visited were "Jane Austen's House" and "Chawton House," which is confusing since both are located in Chawton and connected to Jane Austen. To clarify, "Chawton House" is the large estate that was owned by Jane Austen's brother, Edward Knight. Edward was adopted by the wealthy but childless Knight family (distant relatives of the Austen family) when he was a boy. Edward invited Jane, his sister, and his mother to live in the cottage on his property rent free after Reverend Austen died and left the women relatively unprovided for, and this cottage is known as "Jane Austen's House."
The first place we visited was the cottage where Jane spent most of her time, which is now preserved as a museum. Unfortunately the museum doesn't conduct guided tours, but we were free to walk through the cottage and garden. The exhibit wasn't anything special, though. The most meaningful part to me as a Jane Austen fan was walking where Jane walked and gaining a better sense of how she lived two hundred years ago.
The best part of our trip was visiting Chawton House, where Jane would have been invited often to dine with Edward and his family. We booked spots on the afternoon tour of the manor as an afterthought since Jane's house was the main reason for our visit, so we were really surprised by how much we enjoyed Edward's estate. Both the house and the grounds were beautiful, and while we'd already visited houses, churches, and gardens on our trip, we were impressed by how this estate united all of these elements. We expected to see a house but we also got the chance to explore a church, some gardens, and even a historical women's library that is now housed in the manor. One specific example of how the estate related to our class was seeing a section of original Morris wallpaper, which excited us since we've been studying William Morris so intensely on this trip. Another one of my favorite parts was a window that was added to the house in the 19th century to make the house more symmetrical. Oddly this window wasn't even functional until the house was restored a century later. I thought it was funny since I liked the house immediately because it was asymmetrical, and it was interesting to see such a tangible example of changing fashions in architecture.
After the tour of the house, we took a quick look at the church and some secluded walled gardens. My one regret is that we didn't have time to explore the grounds more and do some sketching. Overall, I preferred Chawton House because it reflected the upper middle-class society that Jane Austen's heroines achieved at the end of her novels. I imagine that Jane, like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, would have loved taking long walks through the vast grounds and gardens, and I'd like to return some day and do the same.

Molly Taylor

This is a pen sketch of the house in Prior Park in Bath. I've decided that I like sketching in pen because the first line you draw has to be the only like you draw. It also helps to see shapes instead of objects.

Features of British Culture

Over the course of these three weeks, not only did I observe English landscape, architecture, art, and literature, but I had the opportunity to closely examine and learn about British culture as well, and several strong features of this culture have influenced the way I respond to the country and people around me.

Privacy - There is some truth to the reputation that Americans have for being loud, and the reverse could be said as well - the English are rather quiet, especially in public places. Conversations are confined to the people they pertain to, stalls in toilets reach almost to the floor with no gap between the walls, and as Lisa mentioned, contact on public transportation is restrained, and when it must occur, it is quickly glossed over and then vanishes into the dim haze of courtesy.

Space - England is much smaller than America, and also much older. Many buildings are older than fire codes or specifications for the disabled. Hallways and rooms are often in odd shapes to allow for the maximum usage of what space there is. For example, to get to the Backpacker's in Oxford, we had to first climb up the steep stairs to the third story (American). No lifts were available at all. In London, our hotel made excellent use of floor-to-ceiling mirrors in the entryway to give the illusion of a much larger space. I think that it's because of having less space that English people are more tolerant of squeezing together on the tube and in buses. This space issue also translates into how the English value distance - many of them don't drive because they simply don't need to. Whatever city you might find yourself in, you're in walking distance of most necessary shops.

Flowers - I haven't really drawn any conclusions about the flowers that I've seen, but I took a lot of pictures.