{"id":7325,"date":"2014-12-28T07:05:50","date_gmt":"2014-12-28T07:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stragnell.com\/befoulednews\/?p=7325"},"modified":"2014-12-27T16:02:06","modified_gmt":"2014-12-27T16:02:06","slug":"28-december-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.stragnell.com\/befoulednews\/2014\/12\/28\/28-december-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"28 December 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

We survived! Just about. Hope you did too.<\/p>\n

The festivities actually started for us last Saturday when we went up to London for our occasionally annual pre-Christmas theatre outing with our good friends Dave & Sue Walton and Sue & Stuart Kelly-Brown. Ms Playchute and I dressed up in our best Christmas outfits \u2013 she looked great, as always, and I looked tolerably presentable. We\u2019ve been doing this for some years \u2013an exhibition or gallery in the morning, lunch somewhere and then a matinee performance of a play followed by dinner and a fairly early train home \u2013 we\u2019re generally tucked up in bed by about 9.30!<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s exhibition was Rembrandt \u2013 the Late Works<\/a> \u2013 at the National Gallery which was outstanding. We\u2019ve all seen Rembrandt\u2019s stuff certainly in books and such but also, probably, a fair proportion of us have seen some of his work in person. This collection was excellent and the audio commentary was very interesting and informative. I\u2019ve always been a fan of the great way he uses light and some of these paintings were excellent examples. But, I wasn\u2019t as familiar with his technique and the depth and texture this gave his work which you only see when you can view the works up close and in person. Apparently, according to the audio commentary, Rembrandt was the first to use a palette knife for actually \u201cpainting\u201d as opposed to merely for mixing paints.<\/p>\n