Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

National Portrait gallery, National Gallery and Canada Day Celebrations

For today, we headed to the National Portrait gallery, just behind trafalgar Square in London (like literally). We peered at it’s history for a bit before venturing into the BP Portrait Awards for 2009. 

Gerard made it interesting in mentioning that, over the last few years, the entries could be artworks created with the aid of photographs, to achieve photo-realism. Photo realism is exactly what the show targeted, with many entries achieving a photo-realistic effect to a near brilliant finish, leaving many to even think it’s just a canvas printed onto. Most of the group wasn’t impressed with the lack of variation in the collection and to that i agree.

 A few Die-hards of impressionism and expressionism didn’t find it so impressive, and to that I say i couldn’t care less. Don’t dismiss something just on it’s frontal look when it takes hundreds of hours of painting alchemy to achieve; hours we know you could spare more into learning the chemistry in painting. we don’t hear you bashing ancient sculptors and their near-finish of reality, so cram it, monet-wannabes. 

anyways, after the visit, we were told that we could get started on our sketches of a particular piece of art at the National Gallery. I had been looking through most of the more-modern pieces of art, in search for something interesting to sketch. After this, we were free to roam around the Square for the canada day celebrations that the City of London held in Trafalgar Square. The even was, at the least, VERY canadian. not all that much doing on, besides the road hockey pavillion, tents with many fried foods, a beer vendor, selling Sleemans cold for about $5.50 a can. Then there’s Tim Hortons, where you can get  a small coffee for $2.80. needless to say, the event was over priced on the canadian stuff, so me and the gang headed to tesco to pick up some lovely ciders. Try 4 pint cans of Strongbow for about $6? sounding much better.

but hey, they had Cabury's Astros candies there! remember these from the 90's??

Canada day drew in a few folks, but one major problem was the heat. maybe if the event had better entertainers and, oh, i dunno, some music playing, it would have been much more festive, but all in all, it was a fair and good celebration. 

and i just thought this store was particularly awesome. Beautifully decorated, with tons of lights and selling just frozen yogurt by the looks of it. anyways, another great part of soho exemplified.