Manchester and LS Lowry

Street scene
Originally uploaded by jennywren146.

I finally made it through to Manchester today to visit Becky... I've been promising to go for ages since I'd never been there before and never visited her place. In fact, Manchester is pretty nice! I've only ever been to the university and the airport before, so it was cool to actually visit the city. We also went to visit The Lowry, which was built for the millennium and houses around 300 paintings of LS Lowry. It was dead cool - so many famous pictures under one roof!! I learnt quite a lot about the artist himself too... I only knew him before for his industrial lanscapes of Salford (and other places too) and for his famous matchstick men and women. In the beginning he drew the figures from a distance, but as he developed as a painter, the people he painted became more individual with real faces and expressions. 'The Cripples' is a good example of this, but not a picture I'd like on my wall exactly... I had no idea that he was really into seascapes ("life itself", and often referred to as a self-portrait) and his portraits of Anne are really famous too (apparently inspired by the paintings of Rossetti). It also seemed that he led quite a solitary life, and was very close to his mother too. Actually, after the death of his mother, the emptiness he felt was evident in the paintings of the time; a landscape he would once have painted full of life became sparse and empty... I just love his paintings so much; the colours, and how you can almost hear the voices and chatter of the crowds and smell the fumes coming from the factory chimneys. Anyway, enough talk of Lowry for now.

So after all that cultural stuff we then went shopping and wandered around Manchester and even watched part of the FA cup semi-final on a huge TV screen near Selfridges! We went to the best shop over (FOPP) to look for cheap CDs... I wanted to get Rufus Wainwright's Want Two but it was still expensive, so think I'll wait for Demi to buy it first!! So, Manchester was pretty cool. I think I wil be going back soon.