PETER DOIG FEVER
My first contact with Peter Doig’s painting was a picture of Pond Life (1993) in Modern Painters magazine not that long after it was created. I was strangely attracted to the wintery feel of the naïve image and its scratchy surface. The way it mimics the marks made by ice skates on the frozen...
SARGENT STEVENSON
John Singer Sargent was no revolutionary artist but his capacity for effortless representation is pretty much beyond discussion. Being a bit of a Sargent fan has been one of my best kept secrets since seeing the Tate Gallery exhibition in the 1990′s – It’s hard to imagine London before the Tate Modern now!. The thing...
MONDRIAN AT CHURCH / MONDRIAN EN MISA
More on Dutch painting. A friend that I haven’t seen for a long time had all these theories about Mondrian that he’d give me a hard time with every time I came across him at an exhibition opening. He would rant on all excited about the national character of the Dutch and how...
BRAVE NEW ART SCHOOL
I just read a post in Jonathan Jones’ art blog about the new Turps Art School in South London; a school that teaches painting in a contemporary context without charging the massive tuition fees of university art schools. By contemporary context I mean that this is no reactionary or classicist endeavour out to...
VERMEER’S HANGOVER
It’s been Dutch painting for me over the last few months and one interesting thing I noticed is the huge contrast between the work of Jan Steen, who was born in Leiden in 1626, and Jan Vermeer who was born in Delft – some ten miles from Leiden – six years later. Two...
THE SIMPLE SEA
I was rummaging through endless files on my computer this morning, looking for some images I need and can’t find and came across an image I don’t need but haven’t looked at for years. That of a sculpture called Mar (Sea) that I made as a student, must have been 1997. I look...
CONCERT FOR ANARCHY
The least that you expect from a piano is that it be the right way up, but this one is hanging upside down. Too far above my head for me to touch but close enough for me to feel its weight and potential danger in my abdomen. I look at it, it menacingly...
OLD STONES
On my Sunday run this morning making a second attempt at an incursion into the mountainsides of Sierra Nevada – Spain not California – trying to reach the village of Monachil, where I would meet up with my family who were waiting there for me with dry clothes and coffee. Most of the...
AN IMAGE OF THE SELF
That same rectangular shape with a bite missing on its left side repeats itself like a heartbeat, always the same yet each time different and unique. The thick pink and green slime has a gastric effect that could well end up with an unhealthy craving, or perhaps disgust, for chewing on something rubbery,...
THE TRIANGULAR FIELD
A man raises his arm as he walks in the direction of a horse that is peacefully grazing close to a wall. Balthus has decided that I only see this wall from above. The man is obviously shouting at the animal – a lacerating thought in the tranquility of this idyllic pre-industrial...
HENDRIX’S LAST BASEMENT
Maybe Hendrix died in a basement, I don’t know. This basement is covered in vomit – Isn’t that what the paint splashes on the floor are? – as a reminder of the cause of his death and a warning of what could happen to any of us if we chose his lifestyle. The...
FLAMINGO MUSIC
It’s not really a good painting; the landscape is crudely resolved, the flamingoes are uninteresting and the hunter hiding behind the bush looks like something out of an old adventure story book. But George Catlin’s Ambush for Flamingoes (1857) achieves something I know by recent experience is very difficult to nail onto a...
All schools should be art schools.
