Tag Archives: Tate

Watercolour @ Tate Britian

Watercolour Tate Britian

I am a bit late to the party with this review. The exhibition opened in February and closes on 21st of August. Various circumstances prevented me from visiting until recently, but I think it is worth recording my opinions, even if it is only for my benefit.

Before I start the review I should explain that watercolour is my least favourite method of making artistic marks on paper(or any other support for that matter). I find it difficult to handle if I am working anything bigger than A5 size and I find that my results are generally disappointing. There are some artists who can handle the technicalities of medium, but I generally find that their work is, how shall I put it gently, boring. I associate watercolours with meticulously rendered reproductions of country churches and pastoral landscapes. Paintings that make me think, why didn’t you just take a photograph and save yourself the time and trouble.

I also tend to think of watercolour as a very English method of painting. I don’t know if this is a good thing, a bad thing or something that does not really matter.

I did, however, go to the Tate ready to have my opinions of the medium and the artists who use it radically revised.
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Joan Miró at the Tate Modern

Joan Miró Exhibition Poster

I recently went to see the Joan Miró exhibition at the Tate Modern. I have long liked what I have seen of Miró’s work, but, before the exhibition had not seen a lot of it. In addition I knew very little about Miró as an artist. It is, I think a sign of a good exhibition that I left not only having seen a lot more of the artist’s work, but feeling that I had learned a bit about what made Miró the artist and the person he was.

The early rooms explore his relationship with Catalonia and his identity as a Catalan. It is worth noting that Miró always insisted upon using the Catalan ‘Joan’ rather than the Spanish ‘Juan’ as his given name.
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