Tag along!

Brent Museum has a small collection of oil paintings and water colours. Inspired by our Louis Wain exhibition in the gallery next door, and in an attempt to ‘freshen up’ the permanent display with some art, we recently decided to exhibit some Brent landscapes in the main museum near the ‘Home’ section. This was also instigated by our recent participation in the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF) ‘Your Paintings’ project.

According to the PCF there are over 200,000 publicly owned oil paintings in the UK, held in institutions ranging from museums to town halls, universities, hospitals and even fire stations. However, four in five of these paintings are not on public display.

Over the last few years the PCF has been photographing these paintings and collating information about them and is now well over halfway through this project, having photographed nearly 110,000 paintings from over 1,600 collections. It expects to complete the digitisation programme by late 2012, funding permitting.  This spring the PCF visited Brent Museum and photographed our own paintings collection for the project.

The PCF recently turned its focus to publishing online and entered into a partnership with the BBC to build the ‘Your Paintings’ website which launched earlier this summer.  If you have not had a look at it yet please do, it is a real artistic treat.

Out of the 110,000 paintings they have photographed to date, 60% of them are now online.  Brent’s own collection has yet to be uploaded to the online catalogue but don’t let this stop you using it to explore art collections across the UK. You can search by subject, artist, region or gallery/collection.  Alternatively you can scroll through over 60,000 paintings at your leisure or watch an online ‘tour’ led by people such as Dan Snow, Rory Bremner, Tracey Cox and Monty Don.

If you want to get involved, the website is very interactive, and they need your help!  The catalogue  currently displays only basic information about each painting, such as title, artist, and date. There is no information about the type of painting, the subjects portrayed and the styles and movements represented. The PCF is encouraging all of us to become taggers. Tagging involves choosing your own words to describe what can be seen in a selection of paintings and classifying paintings in a variety of ways. By tagging each painting it will enable ‘Your Paintings’ to be searched by users in a more sophisticated and helpful manner.

You don’t  have to know about art to become a tagger; just describe a painting using single words such as ‘hat’, ‘man’, ‘coat’, ‘dog’. The website guides you through a series of questions for each painting.  If you can’t answer it, just click on to the next question or a new painting. Each painting is selected at random and will be tagged by many other people too to ensure that as much information as possible is collected.

So, what are you waiting for?  Start browsing through the nation’s artworks and who knows, you may be tagging Brent Museum’s paintings very soon!

Posted by Gill