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How To Look At Art
Have you got a favourite painting? Mine is ‘A Portrait of the Countess Golovine’ painted by Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, sometime around 1797. It is, unsurprisingly, a portrait of Countess Varvara Nikolaevna Golovine, a talented musician and artist from Russia. Elisabeth and the Countess became great friends and I love the way the Countess is smiling in the portrait, with a red shawl draped around her shoulders and her dark curly hair swept up in behind a scarf. The painting belongs to the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, which is one of my favourite galleries.
I love going to art galleries and looking at paintings, but at first I found it quite a daunting thing to do. Have you ever been to an art gallery and not known where to start? Or heard art critics talking about symbolism, composition and form but not understood? Sometimes looking at art can sound difficult, and talking about it can be a whole other language!
But looking at art doesn’t have to be complicated. Things like symbolism, where objects in paintings are used to represent something that’s happening, like a skull symbolising death, can be important and the composition, or the way things in the painting are arranged, can tell us a lot about the artist and why the painted what they did.
Exploring Australian Alone
Sally-Anne was out and about in Australian, and took us along on a virtual trip. She shared her first impressions of the country, and then her love of the city of Melbourne.
In this report, she explains why she went to Australia alone, and what it is like to travel without companions.
If you’ve been reading some of my reports from Australia, you’d be forgiven for wondering why I haven’t mentioned any of the people I’m travelling with. That’s because there isn’t anyone, I’m on this trip all by myself. I wasn’t too worried before I came because I’m quite used to doing things alone. I live in my own flat, I went to a different high school to everyone I knew from primary school and I quite often go and visit places by myself, but I’d never travelled alone. In fact, I’d never been outside of Europe at all, even with other people, so the whole trip was a bit nerve-wracking, if exciting.
Things that make you go poo….
After talking about bones in my last article, I thought I’d go on to talk about poo, or at least how it’s made.
I like eating. I think a lot of people do. Biscuits are a particular favourite…chocolate Bourbons especially. But how do we get from biscuit, or apple, or stick of celery to the brown stuff we call poo.
Well, it’s thanks to the digestive system, which starts at the mouth, and runs all the way to our bottoms. So let me take you on a guided tour.
Life… in Reverse
We love to publish contributions from our young readers. This was written by 8 year old Janvi, from Cardiff.
If there were to be a parallel universe I think there would be people who lived their lives, like us, only in reverse!
You would start off old with white hair, pains almost everywhere and maybe even glasses and/or a walking stick. You would live in a retirement home with lots of old people, like you. You would spend your time sitting in your favourite chair snuggled up with a quilt and would take medical pills daily. But one day when you would get up to have your daily walk you could get up much easier and you could walk around faster and more swiftly.
What Do You Know About Africa?
What do you think of when you hear the word AFRICA?
Do you think of safaris? And villages?
You might think of drums and dancing. Or do you think of something else?
These are stereotypes of Africa, which means they are a conventional, over-simplified image or impression of the country.