I was interested to visit the British Museum exhibition of South East Asian Shadow puppets as, many years ago, I had lived in Indonesia and had seen them there. Seeing them displayed as an exhibit perhaps changed the way in which I viewed them when in Java. I think I probably concentrated more on the …
Back in the 1980’s I worked for three years in Indonesia and had the great fortune to visit Borobudur while I was there. It was therefore of particular interest to me to look at Indonesian works of art, particularly from the Buddhist and Hindu periods. When in the British Museum I looked at the exhibit …
Perhaps this is stretching the definition of ‘Oriental Art’ to include the Indian subcontinent! But I really liked this painting. It is one of very few so far where I have not seen the original, rather commenting on it from a website image and photograph from a book. What I had not appreciated before researching …
This was another statue from the British Museum. Unfortunately it was in a glass case and it was not possible to walk around it to see the reverse, the light was also dimmed I suppose for conservation purposes. Neverthe less it was good to see it at first hand, there was a great sense of …
The British Museum has a good collection of Japanese, Chinese and South East Asian art. I used my trip there to look closely at a number of different pieces so that I would be able to comment on them for this exercise. It was interesting to compare religious works of art from Asia with comparable …
When on holiday in Greece last year we visited the site of ancient Mycenae and in the site museum we bought a replica of a clay figure from the Mycenaean period. Little did I know that a year later I would be commenting on it for an OCA course! There were two good things about …
There are many benefits from commenting on works of art in the British Museum. The main one, of course, is being able to see the works themselves in three dimensions rather than trying to comment from photographs. A further benefit is that the Museum allows you to use the images from their website for free, …
I saw this beautiful gold pendant in the British Museum. At first I thought that the outer framing of the figure was by a couple of snake like creatures. Researching the figure revealed them to be representations of horns. I like the way that the natural theme recurs through this image – the birds, the …
I have learned a lot about egyptian art from researching these images. For example Baines and Malek (1980 p56) describe how in contrast with western art “Egyptian representation is not based on either of the two main principles of perspective, the use of foreshortening and the adoption of a single, unified viewpoint for an entire …