Today we visited York Art Gallery for the first of two sessions with Griselda. The theme for the day was ‘portraits’ – in particular ‘pose’ and ‘expression’. We looked at paintings in the actual portrait gallery and studied two in more detail – what could we see in the paintings? What could we detect about the sitter or the artist and even the relationship between them?
We also looked at some examples from the current Passed as Present exhibition that compares selected examples from York Art Gallery’s collection of old masters with modern contemporary examples.
We also learned that when modern work is arranged (or ‘hung’ for the correct Art Gallery term!) as part of a larger collection of older works the it is called a Contemporary Intervention .
Perhaps the most fun aspect of the day was using glass screens to do portraits of each other – almost no-one escaped from being a ‘sitter’ and the results can be viewed on our new flickr site.
Next session we’re going to talk about ‘setting’ and what objects or pictures we might use to represent who we are. Griselda gave us some great examples from her own life as inspiration! Note that you don’t have to bring in an actual object if it is large or valuable – a photo or picture from a magazine will do fine.
