Some of the weeks so far .. (including The National Gallery in London)

I'm not sure that it's a good sign that I'm so far behind on reporting what I've been up to - anyway here's something of a catch-up.

What a lovely sky and so much going on in the square

The 4th Plinth -
The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist,

On Tuesday it was part two of the 100 Paintings course and we met at The National Gallery - it really does stand so well in Trafalgar Square (by the way the 4th Plinth has another fascinating work) .



The paintings we looked at this week were again based heavily on Christianity - many of the works considered the life of Jesus from the nativity to the crucifixion (see one below).

Sainsbury Wing - lots of paintings

What I did after the group dispersed was take a sneaky look at what we're likely to encounter soon - in fact less than a 100 years after some of the work we'd seen paintings were often made using oil based paints and on canvas (rather than tempera paint on wood).



What we're going to see is perspective and the depiction of character- it's going to be good.

Virgin and Child enthroned -Margarito of Arezzo (1260's) - 

Photographers' Gallery

On Thursday I had the chance to make a couple of introductory group talks at the (recently re-branded) Museum of Brands.

The Museum of Brands -A new style and use of fonts

I enjoyed chatting with people from U3A and as well as delivering the welcome to folks from  'Evergreen' spending some chat as we walked through The Time Tunnel.

[Incidentally interested to see that many Museums and other leisure activities are starting to roll back concessions/discounts aimed at 'Seniors' - perhaps some justification as many are well able to afford the full price more than younger folks.]

In the gap between my two 'welcomes' I went along to The Photographers' Gallery - a nice split between the full on documentary (and of course Black and White)  work of the late Tish Murtha and the 'Hollywood gloss of Alex Prager.

Elswick Kids by Tish 

Alex Prager's work often has a Hitchcock-ian dimension