I really enjoyed looking around Brighton Museum as there’s such a wide range of exhibitions on display. I’m really interested in history so I found it fascinating learning about Brighton’s history, especially through art.

I enjoyed the 20th Century Art and Design exhibit, as it gave a look into many of the major styles and movements from the century including aestheticism, art nouveau,  post-war design, and surrealism. I was especially excited to see that Grayson Perry’s work was featured here, I love that on the surface his work appears beautiful, but every time you look at his pieces smaller details reveal a hidden meaning. The piece featured ‘Difficult Background’, appears to refer to childhood and nostalgia buts in fact highlighting war, terror, and the atrocities that result from it.

I also particularly enjoyed the exhibition about the Camden Town Group of painters. I really like how their paintings are able to remain representational and realistic, while exploring a vibrant use of colour. The way they apply the paint creates a mosaic effect which really simplifies the scene and its forms. I like that the subject matter in all of the paintings is very ordinary, and it looks through an observational lens, as it gave me as the viewer a glimpse into everyday life in the Edwardian Period.

I mostly chose to draw pieces from the Fine Art exhibition, as it featured a lot of vibrant abstract pieces which I thought would be fun to capture. I used a different media for each page that I drew, including acrylic paint pens, chalk, oil pastel, and pencil. I haven’t used chalk much before but I enjoyed working with it, I was able to produce marks with very little pressure so I could create lighter sections, and gradually build up to darker tones. I could also create a rougher surface texture, or blend out the marks to create smooth textures and shadows.