REAL ENGLISH: How to talk about art

Let’s say you arrange to meet a friend at an art gallery or museum. There will be a lot to comment on while you are there. To help you talk about art in English, I bring you this lesson filled with useful vocabulary and expressions to talk about painting, photography, sculpture, and more. I will give you ideas of what to talk about and how to express those ideas. I will also give you tips on how to understand the artwork itself and how to comment about it to your friend. You will learn the meaning of words like “installation”, “medium”, “watercolour”, “seascape”, “marble”, “bronze”, and more. You will also discover the difference between traditional art and experimental art. There is a lot to learn in this video, so don’t miss it! Make sure you understand it by taking the quiz: WATCH NEXT: 1. REAL ENGLISH – Making Plans: 2. Life in London – Visiting an art gallery: 3. The Vocabulary of Music: TRANSCRIPT Hello. I’m Gill at , and today’s lesson is about visiting an art gallery and the kinds of things you’d see there, and also how to talk about them. So, you may have seen a lesson I did a while ago on arranging to meet a friend, and one of the places you could have met your friend was at an art gallery, so this lesson follows on from that. If you’re meeting your friend at the art gallery and you go around the art gallery with that person, what do you talk about and how do you say things? Okay? So, first of all, then, you have to decide where... You’ve probably already arranged where to meet: Outside the gallery; inside the gallery; in the foyer - the entrance to the building; if there’s a cafe which there usually is, meet in the cafe, have a drink first maybe; or there’s usually a shop or more than one shop - there could be a gift shop, a book shop, so you might meet in a... In the shop in the gallery. You might decide to meet in a particular room in the gallery. If you know there’s a room with paintings in it that you’re particularly interested in, you could say: “We’ll meet in that room where they have those paintings“, because you can start looking while you’re waiting. So, a particular room or a particular gallery. Within an art gallery, the separate rooms are also called “galleries“. So, you might say: “Let’s meet in the... Oh, the gallery where they have all the... The kings and queens in the portraits“, something like that. I’m thinking of the... The National Gallery in London because this lesson really is for the big art galleries, museums, so I’m thinking of the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate Britain, the Tate Modern, big art galleries like that. Okay, so they have different rooms which are called “galleries“. You might also say: “Let’s meet on the first floor or the second floor“, because you know that that’s a good place; you can sit down somewhere or you can start looking at something while you’re waiting, whoever gets there first. So, that’s how you decide where to meet. And then once you’ve met, then you want to go in and start looking at some of the... The art. So, what are you going to see in the art gallery? You... You may already go to lots of art galleries, so you will have a good idea of what to expect; but if you haven’t been to many art galleries, this is just a summary, and also giving the English names for things of all the kinds of things you would expect to see. So, the kinds of things you see could be pictures and paintings, sculptures, statues, photographs, and these modern things called “installations“. And all of those, those types of art - that’s called the “medium.“ The “medium“ is really what’s... What the work of art is made of. So, all these things here in brackets, some of them are telling you what... For example, you could have a painting. And what is it made of? It’s canvas, which is a kind of cloth with oil paint on it. So, it’s called “oil on canvas“. Sometimes pictures are painted on a panel, a wooden panel, so it could be: “oil on wood“ or “oil on panel“. Panel. Okay. Sometimes the... The paint is not an oil paint; it’s a water colour. So... Which is much paler. So, it could be a water colour. So, there are different... The medium is the type of material that’s been used to make the work of art. Okay. So, with a sculpture, for example, a statue, it could be made of stone, like marble; metal, like bronze; or could be wood, it could be carved out of wood. Okay, so those... That’s the medium used to make the sculpture. And then photographs are always, of course, black and white or colour. Oh, there’s another type as well. […]