The First Raster'd Image Laid Out

Some nice photos from today

The March home on the 21st

Alexander Nasmyth

Apparently he was called the 'father of Scottish landscape.' That's epic, just like the painting above.

Joseph Mallord Willaim Turner

Another featured artist of the gallery was J. M. W. Turner here and after referred to as Turner because I don't have the time to type it out over and over. I saw a beautiful landscape with depth and detail which like David Robert's made me want to explore the world. His paintings are bold and dramatic and more photo realistic than Howson of course who makes a point and an impression with his style. Unlike Howson's work which is often hard to look at Turner's darkest works are beautiful which is another point to think on. With the right eye you could see beauty in the worst of places, whether you should or not. It might add to the gloom of a dire situation to notice the beauty in the moment, I think he did.

David Roberts

The Scottish painter David Roberts is one of those whose work I saw in the gallery and I have to say his work, of which I only saw one at the time, certainly captures the awe inspiring qualities of Egyptian architecture.

It would have been amazing to have seen this for the first time in person and by that I mean to walk about these temples and see the pyramids without the saturation of exposure we all know via the television. I find reality of sight sadly disappointing sometimes when it seems nothing more than another version of the image I saw on a browser or a documentary but back then he might have seen paintings or drawings but not even photographs. It would have been new to him, the sounds the colours, all new. We don't get that as much now. It's fine watching the world on television but it's always someone else's until you're there yourself. We should be awestruck when we see these places but the moment was lost because we've seen it and maybe we can't even point it out on a map but we know the colours, the bricks and we could describe it like we'd been staring at it our whole lives. It's a bit sad, I could tell you exactly what St. Basil's Cathedral looks like but I've never been, never seen it. I wouldn't be surprised by how it looks, not as I should because the place is mad.

Peter Howson

I was in the Aberdeen Gallery the other day. I saw a Peter Howson painting and remembered writing an essay about him in high school. Every feature of the figures is heavily pronounced and the images are always so dark and bleak. The brutal nature of the images explains why he was the official artist of the Bosnian war and has managed to stir up so much controversy with some of his work. Like Pablo Picasso's Guernica the work captures some of the worst aspects of humanity.