The reason for the trip was for our now annual trip to see the BP Portrait Awards at the National Portrait Gallery. It didn’t disappoint with its strange mix of large copies of ink jet prints, sorry photorealistic painting – Hynek Martinec’s Zuzana in London 1300 x 1100mm acrylic on canvas being the largest example of this. I think I’ve mentioned before my felling that this is a totally sterile approach – incredible skills matched to an almost same level of pointlessness. I know I’m a bit of lone voice on this but you can only be honest – these approaches to painting leave me cold.

As a counter point to this was a beautiful study of her god daughter by Jennifer E Renshaw – quite wonderful.

Carl Randall won last year’s Travel award and so had a mini exhibition all to his own. They were series of paintings he made as a result of travelling through Japan. They were totally different to all of the other paintings on display, surreal compared to realistic approach of most of the other paintings exhibited. Whether all of the paintings worked is another matter but contrast was worth it.

Before we went to see the BP we went around the Laura Knight exhibition which I found a bit uneven. I had visited another Knight exhibition in the early part of the year with my good friend David Manley and found the work to be on the whole commercial works from the 1930s. However, the drawings and sketches that Knight had made were wonderful. Much the same could be said of the paintings exhibited up to a point. This point being that some of the paintings broke through the barrier of high competence to display real power – examples of this would be the portraits of Joan Rhodes and Ethel Bartlett – both were very simple in their approach yet of so powerful.

IN many ways the two exhibitions made for an interesting contrast and both well worth going to see.

For the rest of the day we spent wondering around the National Gallery, where we had lunch in the Cafe nearest to the National Portrait Gallery. This was a wonderfully friendly eating environment – especially compared to the snotty National Gallery Restaurant at the other end of the building which didn’t seem too interested in my custom. I’m not sure what the food was like there but if you want to combine art with food then the Cafe is the place to go or perhaps the restaurant at the Royal Academy – a wonderful dining experience.

So a good day out and thanks to Boris and surprisingly relaxing one.

Simon Marchini
WWW.Simonmarchini.co.uk