A brief window of nice summer weather and lots of interesting exhibitions on, as London's tourist season gets into full swing, made a spot of gallery trawling seem the thing to do last weekend.
First stop was the National Portrait Gallery, in St Martin's Place, where the 2011 BP Portrait Awards are showing - an annual competition open to anyone over 18, from any country, working in portraiture - seemingly not as popular an art form as it once was ...
I posted about last year's show here. Both years I've found the judges' choices surprising - you can see the four prize-winning portraits here - and apparently I'm not alone in this. Visitors are also given the opportunity to vote for their own favourites and it's interesting to see how different the popular choice is!
These were some of the portraits I liked or found interesting (the images below from the NPG's website) ...
One of my favourites was Latoya by Alan Coulson - I liked the contrast between her vibrant, colourful clothes and her face which is so composed and quiet ...
I also loved the feel of Barbara Skingle's portrait of her daughter with pet canary, Katherine (and Millie) ...
In very different vein, Edward Sutcliffe's oil painting of the actress Glenda Jackson (more recently Labour MP for many years) was photographic in quality, the skin texture astonishing in minutely exact detail, and shows her as stern, rather humourless and quite fearsome ...
Somewhat prettier was the romantic subject R.H. by Isobel Peachy ...
I liked the strong colour and life in this portrait of Boy George by Layla Lyons ...
and I was really taken by Manuel Ferrer Perea's tender portrait of his daughter waking from sleep, titled Despertar (Awakening) ...
Ohh! by Cayetano de Arquer Buigas was chocolate-box kitsch but made me laugh out loud ...
The most interesting of all for me was Wendy Elia's I could have been a contender, a huge canvas (unfortunately I can't find a decent quality image of it on the web). We see her painting herself in a full-size mirror, with two of her children in the room (note the son's appalled reaction on seeing his mother nude! and the daughter gazing at herself in the mirror), her grandchildren present in photographs in the room, and yet another view to the outside through a window, from which a CCTV camera points inside the room. I liked the fact that there is a story to this picture, as well as her honest take on herself as a woman, artist and mother. (Her feet are extraordinarily well painted and seem to have a story of their own).
After the exhibition we headed upstairs for lunch at the Portrait Restaurant on the roof, where glass walls give fantastic views of the city, across Trafalgar Square to the London Eye and Big Ben. It took a friend visiting from Cape Town to introduce this hidden-away London gem to me - thank you, Cathy! - and it's my newest favourite lunch spot ...
After lunch, Younger Daughter steered me off in the direction of another new spot a little further north - the German Gymnasium, a recently-converted gallery space in Kings Cross ...
... where she'd heard of an exhibition by a recently discovered photographer whose work has sparked great interest in New York and now London ...
Vivian Maier, self-portrait www.vivianmaier.com
... Vivian Maier, born in New York in 1926 of French and Austrian parentage. She spent most of her life working on and off as a nanny and all her free time walking the streets of Chicago and New York, photographing street life over more than three decades, from the early 1950s onwards.
In character she seems to have been as interesting as her photographs - she's described as an eccentric loner, intellectual and opinionated, obsessed with her personal artistic life but uninterested in sharing it. She died in poverty in 2009 and her work would have remained forever unknown if a curious real estate agent had not discovered an astonishing stash of over 100 000 negatives packed away in storage lockers amongst her few possessions after her death!
In character she seems to have been as interesting as her photographs - she's described as an eccentric loner, intellectual and opinionated, obsessed with her personal artistic life but uninterested in sharing it. She died in poverty in 2009 and her work would have remained forever unknown if a curious real estate agent had not discovered an astonishing stash of over 100 000 negatives packed away in storage lockers amongst her few possessions after her death!
These are just a few samples of some of her earlier photographs. They reminded me of some of the great photos of this era from Life magazine, and perhaps will become classics in their own right.
And from here we intrepid art viewers summoned the stamina to head towards Picadilly, to check out the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition - an annual event for which members of the public - amateurs and professionals - are invited to submit art work. And submit they do - this year they had over 12 000 entries from 27 different countries!
Not all are exhibited, fortunately, but it does almost seem that way as you trek from one giant exhibition hall to the next, gawking as much at the sheer quantity of pictures as at the pictures themselves, all of which are also up for sale.
And were they worth the visit? The few I wouldn't mind owning were way beyond my means, and the rest, well, they ranged in quality from quite interesting to downright mediocre, so I'll rather sign off with a pretty pic of Londoners enjoying the sunshine in the pretty courtyard of the Royal Academy ...
