Museums, huh?!!

I absolutely love visiting museums. Especially while traveling and taking lots of photos. It’s both relaxing, because I get to see what somebody else has created, and inspiring since I get stimulated by what I see. No input, no output. And by that I mean you just can’t produce things like photos if you don’t take in other things that inspire you like different forms of art. 

I once wrote that everything I’ve learned about photography I’ve learned from looking at paintings. Of course that’s not really true but, it shows me what’s possible and I want my photos to look like paintings more than I want them to look like photos. Sometimes the light is really strange so then I can’t create contrast in the photos by the light in them, but once in a museum, I don’t remember which artists work I saw, I got confirmation that it’s ok to use colours for contrast. And I’m all about colours. Even if I take a photo of something that’s black and white, I still take the photo and edit it as a colour picture. 

This afternoon here in Ubud I visited a great museum with paintings by Antonio Blanco who was born in Manila in the Philippines and of American and Spanish decent who lived and worked here in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. It was so inspiring and such a beautiful place, it wasn’t just a museum, it was a complete experience because the building and gardens where a part of my experience there.

It reminded me of when I visited Salvador Dalís museum in Figueres where you see different things depending on where you are placed in the different rooms in the building and outside. Apparently Antonio Blanco has been compared to Dalí but that’s not something I could see in the paintings, only in my experience of the place. And I really enjoyed it.

I hope that many more people visiting Ubud will take their time to visit the museum not only because of the art but it’s also a nice break from the usual tourist things you do and a chance to get to know the history of a place. Another museum I visited and was inspired by here in Bali was the Museum Pasifika in Nusa Dua.