Gallery Visit Quarter 3

London



1. I think you could sort of consider the entire city of London a really big museum because everywhere you look you are surrounded by culture, history, and art; all around the city there are the showing musicals, statures, buildings with antique architectural images, etc. I loved it so much because it was so incredibly beautiful.

2. I went to the National Gallery in London. As I was walking around I got really excited every time I saw a painting I had learned about in Art History class for it was very different seeing them in front of me than in a textbook. I was surprised by the sizes of some of the paintings though; Giovanni Arnolfini and his Bride by Jan van Eyck was a lot smaller than I expected and The Ambassadors by Holbein was a lot larger than I expected. There were also people sitting in front of certain artworks and sketching them which was really interesting, because I've never seen that done in Singapore or any museum/art gallery outside of Europe.

3. I also went to the Tate Modern and was pretty disappointed to see that the Lichtenstein (one of my favourite artists) exhibit was in March, so I was unable to go see it. Some of the pieces on display in this museum were pretty strange. I saw one that looked like a furniture display from Ikea, and another was just a canvas painted black. I really liked this one piece that was basically the words violence, violins, and science spelled out in neon lights on a black wall that would flash at different times - I think it was the colours used that really appealed to me.

4. Another art gallery I went to was the Victoria and Albert Museum. This museum was gigantic; it seemed like they had sections of art from every place on Earth. We went to this museum twice. The first time we just walked around and looked around. The second time, my dad's friend's wife, who studies there, showed us around. She took us to this one area where they had random structures and art pieces that still weren't organized into certain exhibits. On the left is a picture of my Dad and I in that section of the museum in front of an incredibly large column. However, I was really confused as to how they were able to bring such large structures inside. 

The variety of art that it contained was amazing. I really like the section with all the stained glass. It was also really cool how there were these stairs, called the Ceramic Staircase, we used that had the roof above it painted with Roman gods.

(The Ceramic Staircase: Picture taken from Flickr)

5. We also took a bus to Windsor Castle where the rooms had everything arranged the way it would've been if the royal family still lived there which I really liked because you could walk around and get a closer look at some of the lavish furniture and the paintings hung on the wall looked like they belonged there. The fact that certain rooms stuck to one colour palette really appealed to me because every room you stepped into was completely different then the last one. There was also a section which showed the doll house collection of one of the previous queens which I found incredibly creepy since I'm scared of dolls. Beside that was a room with different portraits of the Queen. I found most of the photographs really nice and flattering, but there was one that had her superimposed on different backgrounds which I thought looked like somebody who had very minimal photoshop made. There was also a painting by Lucien Freud which, for the most part, I didn't really like. The crown which was painted on her head, I thought, was really well done.
   

6. St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey were two of the churches we visited. St. Paul's was in the Baroque style and you could go up into the dome and look down at the main floor. Westminster Abbey was in the Gothic style so I found it a lot prettier because I find all the ornamentation gorgeous. There was a part in the church where they had a mirror set up parallel to the roof so that you would look at the ceiling which was absolutely breathtaking. The details in the designs were so gorgeous, I just wanted to stay there forever. I also took part of the holy communion there so which was quite an experience.

St. Paul's Cathedral

Westminster Abbey