Time Travelling Art Adventures

No TARDIS required

The Art of Looking: How To Tell A Good Painting From A Bad One was a course that only lasted three days, but I have thought about it every day since it finished. I loved it so hard I wanted to squeeze it until the pips rattled. During the course I confessed that I once got so excited by an Anthony Gormley statue at Another Place, I licked it. It became a measure of how much I was enjoying the artworks we looked at. Would I lick it?  Would I nick it? Or would it be both, a dribbly heist, if you will? Critical damnation would involve eschewing it with a firm tongue. As far as the course went, I would resoundingly and with no hesitation both lick it and nick it.

 I only discovered it through an Instagram ad by our tutor, Rose Davey, that dropped casually into my feed a few days before the course started. I never usually bother much with Instagram ads. I lead such a strange life I tend to find that I’m difficult to target, advertorially speaking. Age wise I am very much supposed to be in my support stockings and laminate your entire face era. Emotionally I am most definitely in my get a tattoo of Little My and eat cake for breakfast era. You can see where the conflict arises. Nevertheless, Rose fell into my life exactly when I needed her with a funny and seductive call to arms. My fate was decided with the click of a button.

Despite the course only being three days long, we packed a lot in. Too much to write about in one newsletter, and honestly, I learned things I will return to over and over again. Art appreciation is for life, not just for Christmas.

As well as discussions, presentations and lectures at the Slade, we went out every day to visit different galleries. On day one we went to the National Gallery. On day two we visited Tate Modern and on day three we visited three commercial galleries in Fitzrovia. As well as practicing our good art/bad art recognition skills we looked at things like how to recognise in modern, abstract art, the same techniques and ideas that underpin more classical art. We also looked at how public art institutions choose work to buy for the nation and how commercial art galleries are informing and shaping what those institutions acquire and why.

I am not generally a lover of traditional art. The National Gallery is my least visited gallery by far, because I find myself passing swathes of paintings at speed with no desire whatsoever to give them even a tiny lick. I particularly dislike what I call ‘brown’ paintings. This wipes out pretty much the entire Eighteenth Century in one fell swoop. I have a theory that brown paint was probably the easiest to make (mix up all the leftover paint hanging around the studio, and voila), and was therefore cheap and freely available. It could also be that bathing was a rarefied art in those days and everything just naturally looked more brown, thanks to a liberal application of muck. Whatever, I fear brown paintings and the National Gallery have an abundance of brown things on show, so I rarely go.

I can highly recommend going to an art gallery with an expert for changing your mind about brown paintings, or any paintings that you just don’t get. We did a whistlestop tour of Rose’s highlights, spending about ten minutes in front of each painting as she guided us through what we were looking at. We learned to admire technique and the why of the painting, even if we didn’t love the brown-ness and the who of the painting. I particularly enjoyed discussing Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast, a symphony of brown and a painting I really dislike, but reassessed in terms of it being a bit of an Eastender’s style cliff-hanger.  I implore you to spend a minute or two looking at the painting, where Belshazzar, who is swanking about with a load of treasure that doesn’t belong to him, literally sees the writing on the wall telling him he’s been caught bang to rights and he’s going to get his. Now imagine it with the dull thudding of the drums at the end of an episode of Eastenders playing. Also, the woman in the background looking horrified looks a lot like Angie Watts finding out that Dirty Den has lived up to his name, yet again. It’s a truly enjoyable and transformational way to look at that painting. I’d even volunteer to go and look at it again.

My favourite reintroduction though, had to be to Rose’s invitation to look at Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait as an Instagram post for the Kardashians’ of their day. It is, essentially a picture that invites you to marvel at all the top class shit this couple have amassed and can afford to have immortalised. Painted in 1434, everything about it is an orgy of luxe, from the abundant light in the room to the handful of oranges casually tossed on the windowsill. The sheer weight of the material in the woman’s gown and the individual ermine hairs picked out in the trim make it something that wouldn’t look out of place at the Met Gala. If you were to soundtrack this painting it would be Hypnotize by The Notorious B.I.G.

So, not only did we learn to look at how paint is applied, think about single point perspective and marvel at how painters portray the gleam of glass or the ripple of water, all of which was fascinating in itself. We also learned to shrink the distance between the Thirteenth Century and today in the blink of an eye. Nobody said that time travelling would be on the curriculum.