Art, innit

At the Dabbler I write about Antony Van Dyck's portrait of Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart, the second in a series of short posts about paintings in the National Gallery.

I'm keen as mustard on the visual arts but have never really found a way to write about them before, partly because I'm weak on the technical side but mostly because the primary impact of great paintings is ineffable anyway.

My solution is to dispense titbits and amateurish opinions. Luckily, blogging is the ideal medium for this form of....Dabbling.

Tim Lane

Over at The Dabbler I interview illustrative artist Tim Lane.

The Surrealists

Draining the last of my hilariously-expensive Czech lager and wrenching myself away from the Cockney and his fascinating stories of the wife’s failure to buy an electric fire, I strolled idly, with time to kill, over the Millennium Bridge to Tate Modern. I had a vague idea of mooching about the artworks then walking down to Waterloo to catch the tube back to Paddington. However, it had been a long day and by the time the escalator deposited me outside Level 3: Poetry and Dream - Surrealism and Beyond (Room 2), I was feeling lightheaded and clammy and my daytrip manbag was getting intolerably heavy. Forcing myself round the Max Ernsts and Man Rays I experienced a surge of revulsion and, standing in front of Magritte’s wholly pointless The Annunciation, I found myself muttering, like one of those nuts you sometimes see in galleries, “Christ I hate the Surrealists.” Miro’s indistinguishable splodges even took on a sinister tinge, seeming to radiate an intense and personally-directed evil.

Realising I was on the verge of a London breakdown, I headed quickly for the café, for there is nothing so fortifying as a cup of tea and a sandwich in such a situation. What a load of crap the Surrealists were, I mused as I munched. Like Escher and Pink Floyd’s The Wall, these clangingly unsubtle ‘artworks’ are fine for adolescents but excruciating for adults. The worst offender by a mile being of course the Great Masturbator himself Salvador Dali, whose entire output consists of stupefying works of painstaking bad taste and technical skill. But as the tea and sarnie did their stuff and blood sugar levels stabilised, I softened. On the whole, it’s probably a good thing that the Surrealists existed, even if their popularity is wildly out of proportion. And Magritte’s Man with a Newspaper is pretty funny I suppose.

I hate the Edinburgh Festival

Well I’ve never actually been to it, so that’s a somewhat absurd claim, but am I the only one whose heart sinks a little every time the Edinburgh Festival comes round to hog every possible spot in the arts and culture media? The more I read the reviews of tiresomely ‘innovative’ Fringe shows and the ‘look-at-me!’ competitive desperation of the stand-up comics, the less is my desire to actually go to the blasted thing. Anyone been? Am I being wildly unfair? Edinburgh itself is nice of course, always worth a visit during the rest of the year.

Henry Moore Potato

Imagine my suprise and delight last night as I opened a bag of baking potatoes and discovered that one of them had grown itself into a tuberistic homage to Henry Moore.

Above, Potato; and below, a Henry Moore

If anybody else has any pictures of vegetables shaped like famous artworks, monuments etc, do send them in. It will be like an upmarket version of "That's Life".

Sacred music

Simon Russell Beale’s excellent BBC 4 series Sacred Music concluded last night with John Tavener, a composer whose intimidating, anachronistic religiosity reminds me of Geoffrey Hill’s. Makes you doubt your Doubts. It was nice to watch a whole programme about religion without Richard Dawkins appearing to state the bleedin’ obvious.

Sacred music is about humans, hope and hopelessness; God is the justification. In Dawkins’ and Bjorn from Abba's post-religious world, where middle distance-gazing professionals gather in conference centres to discuss painless suicide techniques, and where reclining in First Class on the Eurostar we eat Asian Fusion food from recyclable boxes and tap secret, bleak poems into our Apple notebooks et cetera, I Know That My Redeemer Liveth will still make perfect sense. More sense, if anything – the poignancy will verge on unbearable. Happy Easter!

Approaching the Piglets 2: The Revenge of the Piglets

Where Art meets Horror. And piglets.

Approaching the Piglets

Scandalously, my Alpaca film only managed third place in the 2010 Yo! Sushi Award for Film and Sculpture Exploring Issues Around Identity in a Powerful Way.

Banksy won it, of course, with a video of a day glo orange Guantanamo inmate holding a megaphone but with his mouth taped up, entitled An Obvious Gag.

However, such is the emotional and aesthetic force of my next piece, Approaching the Piglets by the Side of the Lane, that I’m considering saving it for the Turner. I won’t patronise you by explaining the meaning – it speaks for itself.

If ebony and ivory…

...can live together in perfect harmony, side by side on my pyaano keyboard, O Lord, why can’t these alpacas on the alpaca farm* down the road from my office?




This film is my entry for the 2010 Yo! Sushi Award for Film and Sculpture Exploring Issues Around Identity in a Powerful Way. I feel that, in a powerful way, it explores issues around identity.



*not llamas on a llama farm down the road from my office, as I previously thought in my goddamn ignorance

Bust, Bowl and Palette

BBC2 had a programme the other night tracking the trends in mass-market art, from Vladimir Tretchikoff through the cheeky Tennis Girl to today’s bestsellers like Sam Toft and, the current number one smash, this photo of Ullswater. The programme took an unnecessarily long time to come to the less-than-earth shattering conclusion that living room art and gallery art fulfil different functions, so while a Jack Vettriano might look vapid and naff if it were hanging in the Tate, you wouldn’t want to wake up every morning to find Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud screaming at you from the landing. It is therefore besides the point to be snobbish about these things; one might as well scoff at a pair of curtains because they’re not the Bayeux Tapestry.

The programme did get me thinking about my own art collection – an absolute mish-mash of things I like, things created by people I like, things I’ve created myself which nobody else likes, things with a sentimental value and things that I barely notice are there at all.

When at school I cut some tokens out of the newspaper and sent off for a free Picasso print – Still Life with Bust, Bowl and Palette (pictured).


I did this primarily because I thought that having it on my bedroom wall would make me look offbeat and cool. I didn’t really appreciate it as a piece of art; if anything it was a bit of a joke. When I went to university I put it in a wooden frame which I acquired by buying an extremely cheap picture of approximately the same size from a charity shop and discarding whatever piece of (probably rare and priceless) tat was in there. I displayed the picture on my wall for much the same reasons as before but gradually I came to appreciate that there was something inexpressibly pleasing about the way the shapes were put together. Then as I became more aware of Picasso I realised that, in fact, Bust Bowl and Palette was by some distance one of the least interesting and pleasing of his innumerable works. Nonetheless it was the only one I had and I felt an obscure loyalty to it. When I became a bit more solvent I invested in a proper frame and transferred the print to it. While other artworks have come and gone, Bust Bowl and Palette has adorned the walls of all of my abodes. Now, I realise when looking at the picture, any aesthetic appreciation I might once have felt for it has retreated to irrelevance; its appeal is almost entirely based on comfort and familiarity. Never, ever, til the day I die, shall I willingly get rid of Picasso’s Still Life with Bust, Bowl and Palette. And where is the picture now, you ask? Reader, it’s in the attic, waiting until we have a bigger house, because my wife doesn’t like it.

Banksy vs Bristol

So I went to the first day of the Banksy exhibition at the Bristol museum. Arrived 20 minutes before it opened and joined an enormous queue; some people had been there for three hours, the idiots. But it's not often Bristol gets a world premiere and Banksy has been amusing us with his brilliant graffiti for a decade.

I was going to write a review, but it seems that the Times’s Rachel Campbell Johnston has said pretty much everything I was going to say, and better. She’s spot on, if you want to read her.

A nightmarishly real animatronic greets you as you enter...




… but otherwise it’s mostly gags, beautifully done and frequently laugh-out-loud funny, especially when they’re tucked in amongst the museum’s permanent collection. I enjoyed Millet’s Gleaner taking a fag break.

But once you’ve got the joke the artwork holds little further interest. Where Banksy goes political with his paintings and vandalisms, the messages are pretty trite (Rich West vs Third World, MPs as chimps, animal exploitation). He’s vandalised a real Damien Hirst spot painting, which is funny, but displayed it next to Weschke’s extraordinary Leda and the Swan. The contrast illuminates Banksy’s shortcomings as an artist. Most of his pieces could be described in words: you get it then you can forget it. Leda and the Swan is haunting, uncanny and its effect is indescribable. Proper art, in other words.

Of course, Banksy sidesteps the problem by being fully aware of his own shortcomings. But the best of his stencil graffiti was proper art; it stopped you in the street and made you think. The messages were puzzling, ambiguous, suprising. Perhaps the closest Banksy gets in this exhibition is the painting of an anarchist being fussed over by his mother, which is oddly touching and vaguely disturbing.

Otherwise this exhibition is basically a fun afternoon out. Nothing wrong with that; it's well worth the trip. Everyone wants to see it; my colleagues are going to take their kids ‘when it quietens down a bit’. Banksy is fantastically mainstream in Bristol. Most of his art here won’t last, I suspect, but the best of his brilliant graffiti (The Mild Mild West, the Naked Man on Park Street and the Thekla ghost) probably will.