Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

The Projectionists

24th April 2016:   I visited the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery to see the Projectionists.

In The Gas Hall at the Gallery were hung many large scale images by photographer Richard Nicholson depicting the role of the projectionists.

This was a research project by Charlotte Brunsdon exploring the changing role played by the projectionists over the past century.

Charlotte Brunsdon is an eminent writer and  Professor of Film and Television Studies

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The event included a talk given by Charlotte Brunsdon and Richard Nicholson on the important work carried out by the projectionists who are now becoming extinct due to the rise in digital technology.

This is an example of one of the large scale photographs taken by Richard Nicholson when he interviewed the projectionists in their work places. The man in the picture is Ewen MacLeod in the Arnolfini, Bristol:

 The first and second floors of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery are home to a great many art

 works spanning several centuries. These are photos I took of some of my favorites:

Ben Nicholson

Ben Nicholson

L.S. Lowry

Stanley Spencer

Eduard Paulozzi

Scuplture

Henry Moore: Warrior 1954 

Tate Britain,  Millbank,  London

7th March  2016                          I visited Tate Britain to see the work of  Frank Auerbach. 

The work was arranged in the exhibition by decades from the 1950s to the present, many of which are paintings of people and landscapes near his studio in Mornington Crescent. The majority of the paintings are loans from private collections and and are therefore very rarely seen in public.

Auerbach uses both both oil and acrylic paints and has a unique way of drawing with the brush, adding, blotting and scraping the surface until it it has the required effect. The result is that some of the paintings have a very thick surface that is almost three dimensional in some of the works.

 Some of my favorites in the exhibition were his landscapes some of which I have shown below:

Primrose Hill 1971

Albert Street 2009

Hampstead Road, Summer Haze 2010

Hampstead Road, High Summer 2010

I found Auerbach's landscape paintings much more interesting than his portraits some of which I found a bit overpowering. An example is this one called   Head of E.O.W. 1955