It's been a while since my last blog entry... As I don't believe in excuses I won't give any. I just didn't write anything for a while.
While waiting for a job I went to the National Gallery today. A brilliant place. The BP Portrait Award Exhibition was very inspiring. All those different styles, and incredibly precise craftsmanship of the artists. If you look through them online, some of them look like photographs - but they aren't. I found interesting that quite a few of the models were either girlfriend or house mate of the artist. The people closest to their daily lives. Close enough to sit through sittings spread over several months.
After that I went to the "Radical Light" Exhibition about Italy's divisionist painters 1891-1910. I knew Giovanni Segantini's work, but I was impressed with the way the whole group - especially Agnelo Morbelli - depicted the North Italian sunshine. It made me realise how limited our daily intake in colours is if we only look at a screen all day long. There's so much more colour out there! (The illustration in this Wikipedia article shows the visible spectrum and how little of it is covered by a traditional CRT screen, I guess a LCD screen isn't much better).
The majority of the contemporary paintings in the portrait exhibition had a very white lighting. Almost like taken with a flash. The light in the old Italian's work is a lot richer with lots of red commas wherever they could put them.
This day at the museum made me want to paint...
