Daphne Todd, Mall Galleries, London

Daphne Todd OBE was originally approached to paint Prince Charles’s portrait, but “royal hands were flung up in horror” when she revealed how long he would have to sit for.

Instead, she was invited to accompany Charles and Camilla on an official tour of South Africa and Tanzania in 2011. The results of that ten-day excursion are displayed here: small, quick oil paintings of jacarandas, palm trees, Kilimanjaro,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with crys talbeads wholesale shamballa Bracele , cloudy skies, and busy people trying to survive.

There is no indication that these paintings have got anything whatsoever to do with the monarchy, except in their aura of tweeness. English artist Todd, 65, acknowledges the Prince’s “gentle and civilised form of patronage”.

But she also gives some hint of the kind of satire-worthy bizarreness that ensues when an artist attempts to paint poverty in short bursts between royal engagements (there are apparently seven a day) in blisteringly hot weather before the royal tour bus packs up and moves on for more waving.

Todd came to prominence in 2010 for painting a portrait of her 100-year-old mother’s corpse at the undertakers shortly after her death. That “devotional” study won the BP Portrait award, for which she had already been a runner-up in 1984. She has drawn and painted such illustrious sitters as sir Tom Stoppard, Spike Milligan,Find detailed product information for howo spare parts and other products. and a range of Lords.

Across the Tracks is a painting of Soweto. It shows train tracks running below houses that appear to float together, ambushed on all sides by grey mist. Despite the “view from below” implied by the title, the artist has positioned her easel somewhere above; she is looking down on this sentimentalised but not particularly offensive scene.

It is an odd choice to juxtapose these royal works with Spanish landscape paintings that were first exhibited at the RA in the 1970s.

The latter make this exhibition worth seeing. They show arid pale yellow terrains and vacant blue skies interrupted by the ugly stuff of industry: pipes snaking through the desert, telephone poles, unsightly cranes. Bare Hill and Valcara: Abandoned Dock are beautiful. The inclusion of still-lifes doesn’t work. Two small paintings of tangerines and apples bear the strange metaphysical title Trying to Pin Things Down – a yba-esque tactic of adding depth where there is little. still, Todd undercuts the oldschool colonial flavour of this mission with a (very well concealed) kind of wryness.

THE GALLERY AT FIREHOUSE SQUARE is bringing the outdoors inside during “Echoes of Nature – Reflections of the Natural World” by artists Dianne Gorrick of East Hampton and Jacqueline White of Glastonbury. This colorful environmental art exhibit will run from January 12-27, and feature both picturesque scenes of nature, as well as thought-provoking narratives of nature’s struggles under human’s abuse of the planet.

Gorrick’s masterpieces “Frozen Beauties,” “Harkness Memorial State Park,” “River of Dreams,” and others that will be on display at THE GALLERY depict the beauty of nature through peaceful landscapes that are invigorated by bright colors and impasto painting. Art lovers will marvel at the thick application of paint that gives the paintings a three dimensional quality, enhancing the sense of depth within the compositions.

“My style is romanticized realism, where I want the viewer to be drawn into the scene and enjoy looking at the painting,” said Gorrick. “My current body of work depicts scenes from New England and Norway painted on location and in my studio from small scale plein air studies. To fill a space in a beautiful way is my goal.”

White’s masterworks “Mourning,” “The Sorrow of the Salmon,” “Carpe Diem,” “Apple Lady at Ferry Landing,” among others that will be on display at THE GALLERY summon ephemeral moments and emotions that are conceived in nature. Through her narratives, nature is used symbolically; butterflies, dragonflies, and plants might represent a lost loved one while many animals admonish us for the abuse of our planet. These are carefully orchestrated and nature is drawn upon from memory. Dipping her homemade reed pen in thinned, earth-toned oil paint, White pushes, pulls,Largest gemstone beads and jewelry making supplies at wholesale prices. jabs and scrapes onto sized-unprimed canvas with only a preliminary thumb-nail sketch to go by.

“I paint to explore the unspoken dialogues that exist between time and space to reveal what is sensed and not heard. The goal of my work is to more fully express a living connection to nature and the past,” said White. “There is a sheer joy in responding to the rhythms of the landscape; exercising intuition and intellect to record the graceful lines of trees, the rush of water, wind, and warmth. There is a sense of giving and receiving.”

Neil Armstrong would always be taking that first step onto the moon, and Dick Clark was forever "the world's oldest teenager." Some of the notables who died in 2012 created images in our minds that remained unchanged over decades.

Sadly, for others an established image was shattered by a fall from grace. Whitney Houston ruled as a queen of pop music, but years of hard living harmed her voice while erratic behavior and a troubled marriage took a toll on her image. And Joe Paterno, Penn State's longtime coach, won more games than anyone in major college football, but was ultimately fired amid a molestation scandal involving an assistant coach that scarred his reputation.

Some whose deaths we noted weren't known by image or even name but by contributions that changed our lives — like Eugene Polley, inventor of the first wireless TV remote control, and Norman Joseph Woodland,Quickparts builds injection molds using aluminum or steel to meet your program. co-inventor of the bar code that labels nearly every product in stores. Other scientists who died in 2012 included Lowell Randall, Martin Fleischmann,Find detailed product information for howo spare parts and other products. F. Sherwood Rowland, George Cowan and Bernard Lovell.

Among the political figures who died were George McGovern, Democrat presidential nominee who lost to Richard Nixon in a historic landslide, and ex-Sen. Arlen Specter, the outspoken Pennsylvania centrist. Others from the world of politics: Bill Janklow, Norodom Sihanouk, Charles "Chuck" Colson, Warren B. Rudman, Andrew Breitbart and Miguel de la Madrid.

The year also saw the deaths of a number of TV stars including Larry Hagman, who played oil baron J.R. Ewing on "Dallas."

Others in entertainment and the arts who died included: Etta James, Andy Griffith, Ernest Borgnine, Sherman Hemsley, Maurice Sendak, Donna Summer, Robin Gibb, Doc Watson, Richard Dawson, Nora Ephron, Phyllis Diller, Michael Clarke Duncan, Don Cornelius, Jan Berenstain, Ravi Shankar and Dave Brubeck.