Art galleries in London are great spaces to hang out with your children. Many places offer play corners, activity rooms or free activity packs for your child. What I love about that without any plan you will always find something to entertain and encourage creativity in your child.
This time me and Ka made colourful picture viewers. Then we went to gallery rooms to look and take pictures of paintings through different perspectives. We had a great time.
On Tate’s website you can also find some family tips when visiting Tate with children. The best point is “Make some noise – it’s OK to talk at Tate!”. As far as I remember from my childhood when visiting art galleries in Poland there was always a lady saying Shhh, we don’t talk here! So enjoy and share art with your children from an early age!!!
Paul Klee is another must visit exhibition in Tate Modern. Klee was one of the most significant artist in European modernism. His influence can be seen in the works of Miro and Rothko and after visiting the exhibition I discovered much more about Paul Klee.
Klee in German means ‘clover’; clover and good luck belong together. Paul felt his wishes had come true when he painted and he created his work with the aim of making us happy, inspiring us to dream and carrying us off into another, more beautiful world… His motto was: “It is possible to achieve a great deal with very little. Abundance is possible in simplicity, too!”.
I like taking my friends to the places I love, especially if they haven’t seen them yet! I needed to start my trip day with a coffee, so my happy face quickly arrived.
Every time I visit Southbank without checking out what will happen on that day I have a nice surprise and a great time of course. The weather was perfect and I got my first bit of tan.
So my walk started from St Pauls, through Millenium Bridge and a quick stop at Tate, just to catch some positive energy I need for the coming days.
Every time Picasso brings a great smile on my face and this time there was another painting, which I don’t remember seeing before but I was looking at it for quite a while.
Karel Appel ‘Hip, Hop, Hoorah!’ – What is great that Appel often took inspiration from children’s drawings, believing that ‘the child in man is all that’s strongest, most receptive, most open and unpredictable’.
I think that his work is a great idea to teach children about colours! Amazing work:
Soooo Southbank, have a look for yourself:
More information what is happening there daily: Southbank Centre
As part of Festival of Neighbourhood you can find at Southbank The Queen’s Walk Window Gardens, created from reclaimed windows and it encourages people to grow plant in window boxes. Plenty of workshops and information about plants.
More details: Queen’s Walk Window Gardens
Finally I visited Tate Modern today to see A Bigger SplashPainting after Performance.
It looks at the dynamic relationship between painting and performance since the 1950s, and how experiments in performance have expanded the possibilities for contemporary paining.
There is plenty of nudity, however I think the exhibitions is still great for children, to learn that painting is a long process and involves lots of hard work, an act of applying paint to canvas can itself be a form of performance, as well as the reinvention of paintings as a collaborative or ritualistic action.
The exhibition opens with two painintgs from Tate collection.
Jakson Pollock, Summertime: Number 9A, 1948
It’s an Abstract Expressionism – where art should be a form of spontaneous personal expression. On the exhibition you can see for yourself how Pollock created this piece. For him it was almost like a trance, he said: “When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.It’s only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes… because the paining has a life of its own”.
David Hockney, A Bigger Splash, 1960
I could look at this painting for hours. Sunny California, relaxed life, turquoise sky and you can actually hear the splash!!! The colours are perfect, the paining becomes an artificial backdrop that opens up a theatrical space, implying the viewer’s entrance into its fictional world. Hockney said: “I paint what I like, where I like and when I like”, he was always ready to experiment with new techniques.
in the last room yo will find Lucy McKenzie Mrs Diack, 2010.
The paintings at once create a space that the viewer might inhabit and represent a traditional form of paining that invokes illusional representation.
It was also a nice surpise to see so many Polish artists such as Edward Krasinski, Wiktor Gutt, Waldemar Raniszewski and Eva Partum:
I must mention the work by:
Jutta Koether, The Inside Job, 1991
Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Jean Cocteau…, 2003-12. One of his inspirations was Edourad Vuillard, Sunlit Interior, also on display.
Great treat for Art lovers at Tate Britain. Many paintings were already on display before at different galleries, however this time the exhibition puts together the work of young students Pre-Raphaelites as an avant-garde movement. They called themselves PRB – Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood- and you can find this initials in many paintings, the movement was founded in 1848 and they coincided almost exactly with the long reign of Queen Victoria. They admired the spirituality and simplicity of medieval art, and disliked the influence that Raphael had had on art for centuries.
The exhibition was divided into seven rooms. My favourites were:
Nature
Pre-Raphaelites successfully developed their own novel and precise method of transcribing the natural world in oil paint, based on close looking and sustained engagement with the motif. Vivid natural imagery appears in Pre-Raphaelite subjects from Shakespeare, John Ruskin and in imagined scenes of the past reconfigured in the present.
Being on the exhibitions and seeing the paintings yourself you can find out the true story behind the paintings, for example in Ophelia, John Everett Millais used real model Elizabeth Siddal to pose for him in a bath and after spending long hours in the bath, she got an awful cold.
John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-2
(It’s a fantastic truth to nature, hyper realism; the paining shows the death of Ophelia, from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet; mad with grief after her father was killed, Ophelia was supposed to have fallen into stream while picking flowers and drowned)
Ford Madox Brown, An English Autumn Afternoon, Hampstead – Scenery in 1853, 1852-5
(A view from the Hampstead window, looking at London city)
Charles Allston Collins, May, in the Regent’s Park, 1851
(Regent’s Park- yes! May- yes!)
John Brett, Val d’Aosta, 1851
(you need a magnifying glass to see the real beauty of nature in this painting!! Amazing!)
Beauty
Woman is a beauty and many artists know that very well.
Beauty came to be valued more highly than truth, as Pre-Raphaelitism slowly metamorphosed into the Aesthetic movement. The female face and body became the most important subject for them.
My favourites:
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, 1864-70
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Blue Bower, 1865
(great contrast of deep green and deep blue colours, you can nearly hear the music of Japanese Koto instrument)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Beloved (The Bride), 1865-66
(part of this painting you can even find when you leave the Pimlico Tube Station on the wall)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith, 1868
(mythical first wife of Adam, before he met Eva; femme fatale, she personifies a fantastical figure of violence, danger and allure)
John Everett Millais, Sophie Gray, 1857
Paintings from other rooms, for me – more Beauty:
John Everett Millais, Mariana, 1851
Arthur Hughes, April Love, 1855-6
(inspired by Alfred Tennyson’s “The Miller’s Daughter”:
Love is hurt with jar and fret. Love is made a vague regret. Eyes with idle tears are wet. Idle habit links us yet. What is love for we forget: Ah, no! No! )
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Astarte Syriaca, 1877
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, A vision of Fiammetta, 1878
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