Your Paintings - Uncovering the Nation's Art Collection

You might like to have a look at the BBC website Your Paintings by clicking here.

Your Paintings is a very interesting and ambitious project which aims to show the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paintings, and where to see them for real. It is made up of paintings from thousands of museums and other public institutions around the country.

It's run by the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation, and first came to my notice when I was contacted by them earlier this year about a painting of mine which is in the collection of the University of Strathclyde as part of the Dr Helen Cargill Thompson bequest (which you can read about here).  They wanted to catalogue the painting and put it online as part of the project.  

Here it is...

 Autumn Glen (Oil on panel, 8 x 11)

You can view the painting on the Your Paintings website here. 

It's a little picture of Glen Falloch, on the road from Loch Lomond to Glencoe, and was sold at a solo show that I had in September 1995 at the Torrance Gallery in Edinburgh. 

In fact, it got a very favourable write-up indeed in the Scotsman from Professor Duncan MacMillan  (art critic, art historian and author of Scottish Art 1460-2000, no less)-

“Broad brush strokes and bold use of colour evokes the power and presence of the Scottish landscape...the artist’s bold technique is equally capable of drawing objects of delicacy and beauty.  (Her work) combines harmony of colour with subtlety of form.”   

I was very pleased indeed with that review!

The Your Paintings project hasn't yet got all of the 200,000 paintings onto its searchable database (and doesn't have the University of Strathclyde ones up yet).  However, new work is coming online all the time, and you can see what collections it does have, search the database for a particular artist, and get involved in the project by helping to tag paintings and provide stories behind them.

It's a great resource to have.