Hawick Museum Gallery Trip

On Wednesday 18th, we went on a trip to Hawick to see the exhibition of "The Debatable Landscape" where one of our tutors, Siobhan O'Hehir, has some work displayed.

Introduction to the exhibit

Personally, I prefer landscapes or more natural scenes than work of people or buildings, so this trip was great for me. As a whole the exhibition was quite interesting, seeing some of the different ways that artists respond to landscapes. I usually tend to pay more attention to the more representational paintings but today I actually found myself  being drawn to some of the more contemporary/abstract pieces.

These are Siobhan's paintings from the gallery...

 

This (above) is one of my favourite paintings from the exhibition because it reminds me of golden fields in summer. 

 

I really like this painting because it reminds me of a frosty lake with a hill in the background and sunrise with the pale pinks in the sky. I think it also looks like there is a small boat in the bottom right-hand corner.


I also saw some of Liz Douglas' work and thought it was quite an interesting way to show the landscape as she used animals and diatoms as her subject matter instead of the more traditional; sky, hills, trees, etc.

 

 

 

I am sort of familiar with Liz Douglas' work because when I was in second year there was a joint project between art and science so we went out  to Whitlaw Mosses to get water samples and took them back to the science labs to use the microscope to see diatoms (microscopic organisms) and then tried to make 3D models of them using willow branches which had been soaking in water to make them more pliable. I don't have any photos of these but I remember quite enjoying the project because it combined two subjects that I enjoyed.



This last picture obviously isn't a contemporary painting but I did say that I usually pay more attention to representational work.

I love the calm atmosphere in this painting. I think the contemporary paintings are nice too but they tend to leave my head sore because the bright colours and abstract approach can make them seem quite busy; so it was good to have some older, more traditional landscapes in the gallery as well.