A day at the Galleries

I met up with my two friends, Eric & John, today and we visited a couple of exhibitions. Firstly an exhibition of a certain style of modern art stemming from the works of Giorgio Morandi at the Ingleby Gallery. There were two items that particularly caught my attention, the cross hatched etching of Murandi himself which is so detailed that it can even deceive the eye into believing that the work had been created by montage. (see extras 1) and the small wooden forms of Roger Ackling that are decorated with beautiful and extremely accurate sun burnt trails (i.e. the patterns evolve from burning the wooden object with concentrated sun rays through a magnifying glass) See Extra 2.

After a lunch at Kalpna's we then moved onto the National Portrait Gallery and went to see Calum Colvin's photographed works set in amongst the whole Jacobite Gallery and I cannot do better than quote the exhibition blurb to describe his work


'Jacobites By Name is a contemporary intervention by one of Scotland’s leading visual artists, Calum Colvin. Colvin has taken The Scottish National Portrait Gallery’s outstanding Jacobite collection as inspiration and explored the visual imagery and legacy of the portraits and material culture relating to the Jacobite Risings of 1715 and 1745.

In his work, Colvin alludes to the tradition of secret symbolism and optical illusionism in Jacobite-related art. Because support for the exiled Stuarts was dangerous and could lead to accusations of disloyalty to the Crown, ‘secret’ portraits of the Pretenders were to be discovered on folded fans, sewn discretely onto articles of clothing, or concealed inside the lid of a closed box. This intervention inventively combines photography with painting and installation. 

To make his photographic works, Colvin constructs a set in his studio, using furniture and ornaments, and then paints images on to these three-dimensional objects. When seen through the lens of his camera, a two-dimensional image is formed; a blend of reality and illusion.'


The image I have chosen for my blip is fan shaped image in which when viewed from the one side you see the Young Pretender as a youth and then viewed from the other side shows an image of him as a old man. I have montaged two photos together so that you can see both sides of the image.