Today I went to London to visit the V&A and the British
Museum. My intention was to look at more artefacts and to gather further
drawings and photographs. I did some drawings in the V&A, mostly looking at
patterns. But a lot of the things on display were of Asian origin and they had
a very specific style which didn’t really go with my research and drawing so
far. Surprisingly, I did manage to do some interesting drawings of things which
I found in the theatre and performance collection. They had on display two
costumes from the theatre production of the Lion King and there was a video of
the costume designer talking about the African art and textiles which she had taken
inspiration from. She said that she was not trying to ‘rip off’ any other
culture, but had used inspiration from tribes all over Africa to feed into her
own designs. I thought that this was interesting comment to make and something
which I could think about I regards to my own work and my inspiration.
There was a really interesting exhibition in the Americas
section of the British Museum which was all about birth, death and superstition
in Native American cultures. There were lots of beautiful artefacts which were
exciting from a decorative design point of view, but also because of the
stories behind them. I also looked at the Africa collection which housed some
wonderful bright textile prints and both modern and ancient African art. The room
was full of amazing vivid colours and artefacts made up of curious figures and
faces. I took lots of photographs, focusing on the colours and interesting figures which I could develop into motifs.
During the day I managed to get quite a few drawings done,
but I was very pushed for time so relied mostly on recording things with my
camera. This will probably mean that I will do most of my idea exploration and
drawing from the trip at a later stage. Also, my day could have been used more effectively
if I had done better research into what could be found at each of the museums
as the British Museum turned out to be most useful but I only had a very short
amount of time left to explore it before the exhibits closed.
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