One of the great pleasure about visiting a gallery is that one gets the chance just to sit back and make a drawing or sketch or two. Today I went to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and was able to do just that – it was bliss. We got there just after it opened so the place wasn’t too busy and after having a good look at the Grayson Perry tapestries I found time to to capture a couple of sketches.

As for the Grayson Perry I feel he really is a marmite artist – some people find him an insufferable git but I find his work facinating. The six tapestries on display were created to accompany a Channel 4 documentary about him and were roughly based on Hogarth’s Rack’s Progress as well as other paintings. I found the works absorbing even though I had seen a couple of them at the RA Summer show last year.

The other exhibition was Photorealisim: 50 years of hyperrealistic painting. Now I’m not a great fan of Photorealisim as I feel they tend to be technique over artistic endeavour. I know this is bias view and there are many other aspects to consider but in the end of the day the objective of the painting would seem to me to create a copy of the photo you are working from.

So did the exhibition change my views? Well slightly but not to any great extent – I still have concerns. But the great thing about the exhibition is that it gives a really broad feel for the subject and so now I am far better able to articulate why I don’t like Photorealism – which I think is an endorsement of the show.

So all in all and good way to spend a few hours of my life and you don’t have the hassle of having to go all the way the London. There really is a lot to be said for the regional art galleries and their endeavours to put of interesting and rewarding exhibitions. Long may the world outside the M25 continue to thrive.

Simon Marchini
http://www.simonmarchini.co.uk