Posts tagged Art
Visit to the Oxford Natural History Museum
Having a couple of hours to waste whilst in Oxford decided to visit the Natural History Museum for the first time in years to get some inspiration for my insect gait studies (I don’t think I’ve been there since I was a post-doc). I remembered the museum as having a particularly good entomology display, and had been singularly unimpressed by the current public exhibition at the London Natural History Museum which I went to a few weeks ago (call me old fashioned, but I have fond memories as an undergraduate studiously examining countless displays of mounted insects and information about them as background for my final year project… whereas now it’s a lot more hands on exhibits and fancy information stands).
Unbeknown to me before my visit, there is currently an exhibition of illustrations (graphite on draughting paper, and pen and ink anatomical diagrams) by Masashi Kimura, by all accounts a very talented artist.
Shortened URL: http://go.dave-wood.org/1c
Muybridge at Tate Britain
I spent an enjoyable day down in London on January 15th visiting the Tate Britain, and in particular the Muybridge exhibition which was due to finish the following day. The main reason for visiting was due to my ongoing interest in animal gaits (insects and other hexapods in particular), and the Muybridge animal locomotion photographs have been an inspiration for many years as well as providing material for lectures and summer schools.
The most striking impression of the exhibition, before you even reached the sequential photography for which he is most well known, is the outstanding landscape photographs from which he originally rose to prominence (many using a technique he developed to block out the sky to circumvent the problem of overexposing some parts of the plate). Alongside these were his famed lighthouse photographs (he was commissioned by the US Light House Board to catalogue all their buildings), 360 degree panoramic views of San Francisco from the balcony of his benefactor Leland Standford, and many of his stereographic pictures which really showed just how far ahead of his time he was (as well as how astute he was i marketing his photographs). His innovative techniques, at a time remember when photography was in its infancy and moving pictures were undreamt of, really did position himself at the forefront of his profession.
Shortened URL: http://go.dave-wood.org/1b
