Course Related Activities While on Holiday: Gallery Visits and Books

Although I stated that I've made very little progress on the course in the last 4 weeks because of holidays and visitors, I have nevertheless used some of my holiday time on activities related to the course:
During the last four week I visited the following Exhibitions:

Patrick Caulfield and Gary Hume : Tate Britain
Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life: Tate Britain
The Turner Collection: Tate Britain
Keith Arnatt- Sausages and Food: Tate Britain
Ibrahim El-Salahi - A Visionary Modernist: Tate Modern
Ellen Gallagher - AxME : Tate Modern


Notes on the visits to the Lowry Exhibition and the Turner collection I will include in the blog alongside the relevant research points as I move through this section of the course (I have already made written notes but feel they will add more to the blog when used as part of the the research points on each of these artists.) I will write notes in my blog regarding the other visits over the next few posts.

Over the holiday I have read the following Books: 

Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life by TJ Clarke and Anne M Wagner : Tate Publishing 2013 (This forms the Catalogue for the Exhibition I visited and I will comment on this again under the relevant research point)

Landscape and Western Art by Malcolm Andrews : Oxford history of Western Art : Oxford University Press 1999.  
I picked up this book in the Gallery Shop at Tate Britain. I thought this would be helpful to me as I have very little knowledge of landscape art in general. I have not in the past been naturally drawn to Landscape as a subject so consequently have not looked at many of the artists mentioned in the research points or listed by my tutor. I thought this would be a good starting point alongside the gallery visits. I read a smaller, less academic book called 'Still Life' by Norbert Scheider (Taschen) when I was preparing the last section of the course and found it immensely helpful as it provided an introduction to the work of artists I might not have found via independent research.
This book traces the development of Landscape as a genre from being just the background surrounding the main action of a painting through topographical representation and mapping to themes such as the Sublime. I comes up to the modern day with an exploration of Earth works and Land Art. I will include a more detailed review of this book when I write the first Research point in this section which asks me to look at different artists' depiction of Landscape.