visit to london

Recently I was up in London visiting the national art gallery and also taking pictures of the statue that is currently displayed on the fourth plinth. The whole reason for the visit was because of my project of producing a miniature scale model of my idea of a sculpture designed to be placed onto the plinth; seeing the statue up in person would help me to see how a statue would look from a worm’s eye view, which will also give me a better understanding of the perspective viewpoints.

After taking a few photos of the blue French cockerel which is the currently sculpture placed at the plinth, I went into the gallery to see the verity of art work and artists displayed in the gallery, looking at what artists inspired me mostly by their visual outcomes or their style of working and drawings to then make my own outcomes. I found two artist that caught my attention and I found interesting to study. 

One of the artists was Jacob Van oost. His artwork that caught my attention was “portrait of boy aged 11”  the reason why this portrait interests me is because of the brush strokes and the texture of the painting itself, how it looks so clean and smooth interreges my interest and it inspires me to want to create a similar type of painting. Looking at the portrait, the colours that Jacob uses are softer and natural tonal colours, using more brown and skin type skins colours with the background creating a focus point on the portrait of the boy. Also the texture of the portrait looks smooth and relaxed. Jacob did not try to rush the portrait, displayed by the detail of the clothes and also the feather like paint strokes on the fur.

His style of working is not similar to mine as his paintings are not scruffy but very detailed. The work is about where Jacob spent most of his life, therefore painting someone from his country. Judging from his outfit he was probably a member of one of the members of the merchart families in bruges.

Another of my inspired artists within the gallery was quirteem maslys with his work of “the virgin and child enthroned, with four angels” what I see is a painting symbolising the crowing of virgin marry in the kingdom of heaven with four angels by her side preparing her for the ceremony. It’s showing me a spiritual image that portrays an emotion through the image of harmony and spiritual connection to marry. 

Looking at the paintings, it shows a lot of detail of the fabric and clothing, it’s a very realistic paining of the architecture of the chair that marry sits upon and also the clothing’s worn by marry, probably trying to get the focus on marry. Although there is a lot of detail within the painting there is some aspects that aren’t very well painted realistically as the rest of the painting; for example the faces of the angels and marry aren’t really painted to a realistic style, but more just focused on drawing of a visible face to represent marry as he might not have been clear of how she looks so he didn’t want to show a clear drawing. The painting is displayed in the gallery to show a story thorugh the other paintings, showing the life of marry and Jesus Christ.