Art day - don't miss the glass dresses!

Today I decided to make the most of it being a Bank Holiday weekend to see some art in Liverpool. But unlike most poeple who would go and see one gallery or a single exhibition I seem to have turned it into an extreme sport....

I started with the exhibiton windows at the Liverpool Community College in Myrtle Street, as, being like shop windows they opened before the galleries. There were four artists displayed and I liked them all but two were hard to photo as the reflections on the glass of the street really interfered. I got better, although still not perfect photos of my second favourite - work by Karen Ball.

And I loved, loved, loved the cyanotopes by Sian Hughes

From there I walked over to the John Moores Liverpool University Art and Design school for the student show. Sadly disappointed. Two galleries of mostly tosh. ( In my subjective opinion). Is that what they get degrees for? One 'artist' had dropped a splotch of fountain pen ink on to water colour paper from an upstairs window. And framed it. Art? Discuss!

So I went to the 'proper' (I.e. din't start out as the Polytechnic)Liverpool University Gallery and took in the Breaking with Tradition: 100 years of theContemporary Art Society display.  They had some Bridget Riley wall paper designs and I thought I might finally appreciate them if I saw them with an explanation. But no - still just lines of colours to me!

The building itself is a good reason to go to this gallery though:

I then moved my car from its 'Aren't I the locally smart one' free parking space and drove though the tipping down rain into the city (only about 15 mins walk but way too wet) and parked it in the 'Yes I know I should have gone by train' exorbitant car park. That enabled me to still be fairly dry when I got to the Walker Art Gallery. I did very much like the Enamel work by Ruth Hall   but was absolutely transfixed by the glass dresses by Diane Dias-Leao.  There were no no photography signs but because of the light my photos do not do them justice and I'd rather - apart from the photos of the wall illustrations below- that you saw them well shot - so try this site. and the museum's own flikr site here

I think there are 16 in the exhibition and boy was I glad that I had taken my naff-but-so-good-to-the-feet -fishermans-stool-in-a-rucksack with sketching materials. I was there for ages. It is a good exercise to really look and see how she achived 16 dresses that all look like they belong together but are all different - changes of scale, of materials or shapes etc.

Whilst Iwas there I also breifly took in The Rise of Women Artists, an exhibit called From Sketch to Scuplture by Emma Roberts and a room of Tolouse-Lautrec prints.

Then I walked to the Bluecoat Galleries and looked at more mediocre stuff interspersed with some interetsing screen prints in the Global Studio exhibition.

Finally, to compensate for the fact that none of the gallery cafes had any cakes that were half as good as I could have made myself, I went to M&S food hall, bought some high quality chocolate biscuits and came home to start work on some samples based on the glass dresses.