The National Gallery in a Mask

The National Gallery was the last place I visited before lockdown in March 2020 and it was the first place I visited as lockdown starts to ease. Back in March everything was uncertain and no-one knew what to expect, Trafalgar Square was empty and so was the Gallery. It was oddly quiet and I remember walking into normally crowded rooms and finding them empty. There was a nervousness in the air. Yesterday was different in subtle ways. Trafalgar Square was still empty but the nervousness had gone and the Gallery was open, people were happy and smiling, from those welcoming visitors back inside the front doors to the smiling guards in the rooms wearing visors and chatting away. What a difference a pandemic makes.

Outside the National Gallery the big red 'welcome back' banners were fluttering in the breeze as I joined the queue up the side of the Gallery waiting to be let in and put on a mask. The Gallery ask visitors to arrive 15 minutes before entry time and it didn't take long to get inside. The foyer is strangely empty and the bookshop is closed but we were welcome by a very cheerful member of staff directing us to the stairs to get up to the art. Three routes have been introduced, a sort of curated way to see the Gallery safely, and first off for me was Route A to see the early Italian paintings in the Sainsbury Wing.

It was lovely to be back, to say hello to the little Giotto panel, the small Duccio altarpiece, the Sassettas, the Botticellis and Bellinis, the Crivellis and the Raphaels. What to look at first? The floor is marked out with arrows to keep people on the route and make sure people stay safe. I asked one of the guards how I could see the rooms behind the route I was following and he explained I'd need to go round twice before almost conspiratorially telling me that 'that's a Michelangelo over there' as he pointed to a painting. The normally serious guards actually interacting and smiling and welcoming you into their rooms. I loved it.

So I walked round once to get back to the start of the route, then walk round again go into another set of rooms to see the Van Eyck and Campin paintings. I didn't mind. Small rooms were roped off so you can't get close to the Leonardo panels but they're still easy enough to see from the entrance.That means that I visited the Fra Angelico predella twice on the way out of the Sainsbury Wing and it's always a joy to see works by Beato Angelico.

Then I headed off on Route B to see room after room of great paintings. There seems to have been some re-hanging of paintings while the Gallery has been closed and the huge portrait of Charles I has been re-framed into a far more effective frame that really shows off the painting. It was lovely to see some old friends but I couldn't help wondering where Mr Silenus was getting his booze to still be so tipsy even after lockdown. Some people never seem to grow up and none of his mates were wearing a mask either.

It was quite touching walking into the Rembrandt room and seeing the self-portrait of him as an old man, not much older than me. I saw a number of people stopping to gaze at him, perhaps with feelings of their own mortality? There's no exuberance here, this is man who's lived a full life and knows it won't go on forever. Quite sobering really.

It was also lovely to see the self-portrait of Artemisia Gentileschi hanging on the wall next to a Caravaggio, momentarily sad because she should have been the star of her own exhibition at the National Gallery at the moment and then remembering that the exhibition has been rescheduled for the autumn. I'm looking forward to seeing that exhibition.

Walking on and then I found myself in a room of French paintings and there she was, Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun who had an exciting life and died after attending a party in her 80s - that' how to go. Here she is as a young artist showing off her skill as a portraitist and it served her well. I have fond memories of seeing a big exhibition of her portraits at Le Grand Palais in Paris years ago. She deserves an exhibition in London.

Route B (and Route C for that matter) ends withe the Impressionist and post-Impressionist rooms. They are always busy rooms, really busy, but yesterday? Not so busy. I can't remember ever standing in front of the five paintings by Van Gogh and be able to see them all without a crowd of people in front of them.

It was a delight to be able to visit the National Gallery again, a treasure in the soul. Most people followed the advice from the Gallery and wore a mask but some people didn't, or wandered round with a mask pulled under their chins (which is rather pointless). I had to keep re-jigging my mask to avoid my glasses steaming up but it worked out OK. The toilets were suitably socially distanced and there was even a limit to the number of people who were allowed in the shop at the end of the visit. I had to wait a few minutes but I wanted a souvenir of my visit and bought a sim book of paintings by Rubens.

I didn't see the Titians since they're all grouped around the current exhibition about his poesy paintings but I've already booked another ticket to visit and that includes the exhibition (again - I saw it on my last visit in March).

Thank you National Gallery and thank you to all the staff for looking after the paintings during lockdown and now for giving them back to us. I really enjoyed my socially distant visit. I'll be back!

Keith Haring at Tate Liverpool

Tate Liverpool has a great exhibition of paintings by Keith Haring at the moment. I think most people would probably recognise the works if not be able to name the artist. His style has become quite iconic since the '80s and his name should be better known.

He died in 1990, far too early and with so much potential - I wonder what on earth he'd be producing today if he was still with us and painting or using who knows what to create his art? I was quite pleased that one of the messages I took away from the exhibition is that he seemed to enjoy his work and had fun.

The 1980s were a strange decade - liberating, hedonistic and political and that sums up Keith Haring's work perfectly. He was very political and made this plain in his art. Whether it was about weapons or sex, he made his views known and produced incredibly simple and incredibly effective images to promote his views. He produced posters - as opposed to paintings - to be mass produced and plastered up on street walls, whether this was  about war, the church or AIDS didn't matter, he'd still go there.

Something that annoyed me and then drew me in was that he seemed to call all his works 'Untitled'. Or maybe he didn't name them, we did? Part way through the exhibition I decided to give up looking at the labels and that was an incredibly freeing moment - I don't care what  it's called I'll just revel in the moment and enjoy it for what it is. I'll make up the story that goes with this painting, thank you, and it's just as valid as your story. It was a very 'freeing' experience to visit this exhibition.

It's a very well curated exhibition, nicely spread out on the top floor of Tate Liverpool. There's even a 'disco room' to reflect how his first public sales exhibition looked, with loud music and lights - I did a little dance in his honour. There are a few video pieces to demonstrate was he was doing at the time and show his political leanings.

The later stages of the exhibition got darker when he became active in the AIDS movement and discovered that he was HIV positive himself. If anything, that kickstarted his creativity and he created some big, complex pieces about sexuality and death and who knows what else. Seeing these large pieces started me thinking about Bosch and his mad, crowded paintings full of activity and madness.

There were photos and videos of Keith Haring throughout the exhibition but my favourite photo of him is beside the exit door, this one, having a laugh and being daft in his jeans covered in patches. He created some astonishingly powerful works in his short life and he had fun doing it. Go and see this exhibition if you can and wind your mind back to the '80s.

Frank Bowling at Tate Britain

Frank Bowling has a major retrospective at Tate Britain at the moment and you'll be forgiven for asking Frank who? I know, I hadn't heard of him before this exhibition but I'm very pleased to know the name and the works now. The exhibition has been on for a couple of months but was over-shadowed by the Van Gogh exhibition at Tate Britain that has just closed. I immediately warmed to the exhibition when I saw that the wall outside the entrance to the exhibition had been painted pink to match one of his paintings.

Bowling was born in Guyana (then British Guinana) in 1934 and went to the Royal College of Art with David Hockney. I quite like that he came to London to become a poet but joined the RAF and then switched to painting - I don't know if he still writes. He's had studios in London and New York for the last 60 years and he paints big abstract expressionist paintings, mainly in acrylics, and he likes experimenting with the paint and the way it's applied. Most of his paintings are far too big to hang on your living room walls but they look pretty damn fab on the walls of the Tate.

The exhibition is largely chronological, with examples of his early works in the first rooms and his most recent works (including a painting from 2017) in the last room. His early works are semi-figurative and always seem to have had a yearning for abstraction, but it's interesting to see his move from figurative to non-figurative on the walls in front of you. My favourite of his early works was the colourful 'Mirror' painted in oils over 1964-66 with the central spiral staircase. Something I really liked were the tiles on the floor, some painted in 3D and other flat on. It's a very striking painting and is hung in a room with other paintings about his mother and his home, with images of a map of Africa somewhere in the paintings.

I don't know when he moved to mainly work in acrylics but it seems fitting for his style of painting, not the traditional oil paint, but let's try something new and different. On his move to abstraction he still included some figurative elements, such as images of his children peeking through the washes of paint, almost as if they're in one world looking through the painting into another world. It's a bit odd to be looking at a painting, scanning it from top to bottom and then spotting a face in the midst of all that colour, and then another face - you have to really look at these paintings, rather than just the surface colour, to see what's really going on. I wonder what his grown up children thought of seeing themselves when they were really young when they saw these paintings on the walls of the Tate? They'll be my age now with a life behind them.

Bowling seems to just love the medium of acrylic paint and how you can use it. He experimented with it in so many ways, how it's mixed and how it's applied. He apparently built a contraption in his studio so he could tilt his canvases to allow the paint to drip and flow over the canvases in different ways to create new landscapes of colour. He seems to have bene fascinated by paint and what you can achieve with it. Mix it *this* way to achieve this effect and *that* way to achieve that. The message is that you're not limited to what is in the tube or the pot of paint, you can create your own, which he did. Some of the colours he creates are astonishing, adding different things to the paints to create different effects.

Then, not satisfied by that, he started adding things to the canvas to create more textures to paint, all sorts of stuff glued to the canvas, including the collar of one his grandson's shirts. Looking at the labels of some of these later works I loved seeing the list of materials he'd made a painting with, almost always starting with acrylic paint and adding things like acrylic foam, plastic toys, shells and ending with "other materials", ie too many to mention. I think that's when I stopped marvelling at the colours he found to marvelling at the things he created and "got" Frank Bowling in my own way. He's not so much a "painter" as a "creator", he needs to create something new using his favourite medium of acrylic paint, something the world hasn't seen before and so enhance the options we have for seeing things. We cans see things differently if we want to.

One of my favourite paintings was 'Orange Balloon (4 Paul Adams)' from 1996 where you can see a deflated orange balloon bottom left but the rest of the painting is a riot of colour. Bowling was a political painter and the title of this one reflects that it was dedicated to Paul Adams, the first Black player on the South African cricket team after apartheid. I'd love to know what Adams thinks of this and the singular honour he's given. The painting is over six feet tall and covered in splodges of colour, with a bit of everything in there, deliberately.

Staying with politics and freedom, I also loved his painting 'Silver Birch (No Man, No Vote)' from 1985 that shows his support for the African national Congress and Nelso Mandela's call for 'one man, one vote'. The birch trees are made from acrylic foam and other stuff with paint dripped and splurged onto the canvas.

The final room of the exhibition brings us up to date with his works, still experimenting and still creating. I particularly liked 'Remember Thine Eyes' from 2014 with the round 'eyes' created by buckets of paints left on the wet canvas to create the effect of staring eyes. And why not? It's good to be able to see the physical aspects of creating a painting along with the actual finished painting.

At the grand age of 85 he can't physically handle the paint any more so uses a laser pen to show his assistants where he wants particular colours to go on the canvas. I love these old men that keep on creating despite their age and infirmity, like Monet and Matisse, that just keep on creating for as long as they can. I'll add Bowling to that list.

If you get the chance then pop along to Tate Britain to see these astonishing paintings while you can. I'm very pleased that I did!