ARTS & CULTURE: Spring-time and accessing art.

Hello, and welcome.  Today, I’m writing to you from London, and it feels like Spring has finally ‘sprung’.  This week we’ve had long periods of beautiful sunshine and everyone seems to be celebrating the fact that it has finally stopped raining!  Everything outside looks renewed and refreshed; the trees are covered in blossom, daffodils are bobbing their cheerful, bright yellow heads about and there are countless buds and shoots bursting out all over.  It makes you want to go out and enjoy it; perhaps sketch or paint what you see...  There’s a sense of seeing things anew in Spring, don’t you think?  I guess it’s because light and shade are now more clearly defined and the shapes of the living things around us change as they grow.  We’re aware at this time of year of growth and life, and the riot of colour that rings out from various spring-flowering bulbs and blossom.  So light and warmth bring life and enjoyment, which leads me (finally!) to the point of today’s post.

Every day, I like to read the news on the BBC News website, and yesterday I noticed this link regarding Penlee House Gallery and Museum’s paintings.  Penlee House is in Penzance, West Cornwall, and specialises in historic art from the region.  I browsed through the ten selected pictures in the BBC link and loved the light, shade, warmth, personalities and sense of place that shone from them.  I thought the ‘Zandvoort Fishergirl’ (1884) was particularly striking, looking directly out of the painting at the viewer, and the last painting, ‘The Rain it Raineth Every Day’ (1889), reminds me of Jack Vettriano’s work.  Looking at these paintings made me want to visit the gallery and this is something I don’t do often enough.  It reminds me of a visit to The Louvre in Paris a few years ago, and of being totally awestruck by Monet’s Water Lily paintings.  They were amazing.  I don’t think words can describe just how amazing, but I remember being stunned by the scale, colour and sensitivity of his work.  That is, however, my personal response, and of course, we will all respond differently to the same stimuli.  You may see the same or different things to me in any artist’s work, but wouldn’t you agree that’s what makes art such a wonderful thing?

Visiting galleries and museums isn’t always easy, and that’s why the BBC resource that the Penlee House link came from is so brilliant.  If you click here you are taken to the home page of ‘Your Paintings’ (‘uncovering the nation’s art collection’ – ‘in partnership with Public Catalogue Foundation’), where you can access paintings (212,144 to be precise!), and look at thousands of artists, galleries and collections etc.  One of my favourite artists is JMW Turner, and I’ve already spent a while looking at some of the 392 images available to view on the site.  I think this is a fabulous resource for anyone interested in art.  Why not explore it for a while, and perhaps even go and see the real thing in a gallery, if you can?  I’m certainly going to, and why not come back and let us know what you think.  Meanwhile, I'm off outside to enjoy Spring, and hope you can do the same!