Tate Britain: Walkthrough
From Renaissance to Modern Era, art has changed the way society changed, and vice versa. It’s fascinating to witness the way art changes when I walked down the galleries to Tate Britain.
Tate Britain housed most of the Rococo to Impressionist style painting. There is even a gallery dedicated for JMW Turner, one of the most sought after Impressionist artist that painted lots of landscapes and nature-related scenery, which is close to the plein-air painting emphasised during his time. Due to his ambitious and brave heart, he had travelled across the Europe that further inspired his painting subject from scenery of towns to seascape.
One thing that I’ve noticed from Tate Britain is that it houses a lot of portraiture paintings, especially from the High Renaissance period (18th century). Such paintings were referred as Grand Mannerism, which subjects were elites of the period. As a photographer, there’s a lot to learn from this Grand Mannerism especially that composition and lighting of the subjects. I think classic artists does better business portraiture then random youngsters with DSLR that pop out flash straight into your face and charge fees. That's much more worse than my front camera snapchat which filter applied.
And as usual, it takes way more effort to understand modern art compared to classical art. Jackson Pollock along with few modern artists totally drained my brain juice.
However, it's all about the way art changes. Classical art from ancient to 18th century arts right before Cubism (and other modern art movement) starts are arts that wanted to create an illusion to viewers, thus classic artists focus on landscape, portrait and biblical events as their painting subjects.
When Modern Art (the one that you called abstract paintings) arose, the interpreting of paintings saw a change. Modern artists wanted paintings to represent themselves, meaning that we have to look for artist's life and what happened during the painting was created. Everything was well-explained here and I highly encourage you to make some time for the video in the link.
Tate Britain is not as huge as Tate Modern, but it definitely worth a few hours of walk to get inspired by artists from different era.
