Gallery

Thanks to visitors who left notes about their favourite paintings and artists.

To the left we have Vermeer's "Woman With A Water Jug" selected by Alkelda the Gleeful. This beautifully composed, tranquil and exquisitely painted canvas hangs in the New York Metropolitan Museum. Jan Vermeer of Delft in Holland created the picture in the winter of 1664/65.

Next in line is a sample painting by H.R. Geiger - an artist admired by Yorkshire Soul. This particular canvas is called "The Spell II". It seems that Geiger specialised in often rather dark flights of fantasy which have won him something of a cult following. His images are sometimes found on skateboards.

Next there's a sample painting by the Boston-trained Chinese-American artist Zhuo S. Liang - a painter put forward by Crabcake. This piece is simply called "Seated Nude" and it hints at the precise graphical style that has won this artist so many admirers in east coast American board rooms where his heavily price-tagged pictures may often be found.

And finally for my southern friend "By George" who used to teach Art History, there's an example painting by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - "David" holding the severed head of Goliath. Caravaggio was a very influential artist in his day, leading the development of a uniquely baroque style and challenging Italian notions of what painting should be with his new takes on old themes.

Good art both helps us to reflect upon life and enhances it. In appreciating paintings we should find our own paths, our own preferences, learning to look with an open heart and an open mind, glorying not just in the techniques and the patience of the artist but also in the vision, the meaning and the socio-historical milieu from which each canvas has grown. Oh shit...I'm sounding like a boring art historian... Wake up at the back!

The latest addition to my online art gallery was suggested by "Steve". It's Gino Severin's "Sea Dancer" painted as early as 1914 - as World War I broke out in Europe. This is an abstract painting ahead of its time in which bold colour, texture and movement hint at the rowdy and unpredictable power of both the sea and of humanity as we strode confidently into a new century, masters of our planet.

Appreciation

Bathers at Asnieres

This huge canvas was completed by the French impressionist Georges Seurat in 1884. It currently hangs in the National Art Gallery in London. Its construction was painstaking. The composition is so well-balanced and the paint was applied minute blob by minute blob - a technique called pointillism, giving the painting a strange opaque/statuesque quality. This is enhanced by the palely marbled skin colour of the scene's main actors. In the distance, ninetenth century industry provides a discordant background to the still and leisurely peacefulness of the foreground. In some ways this art is about the ordinariness of human life and how we may be close to each other yet wholly unable to connect. I love this painting. I first saw it at the age of sixteen when I hitched down to London to see a free concert in Hyde Park - I wonder what happened to Grand Funk Railroad?

Seurat was only thirty one when he died of diptheria. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank him for his artistic legacy. Have you got a painting you love?

Warning

This is a general warning to the inhabitants of Blogworld concerning identity theft. Unwittingly, I have been the innocent victim of two cunningly fraudulent assaults upon my character. In the latest fraud, a redneck hussy from North Carolina, sometimes known as Amy Carol, otherwise Mrs Friday's Web, has attempted to mock me by superimposing my head on a "Fantasy Island" promotional picture from the nineteen seventies. I wish to state categorically and emphatically that at no stage in my life have I ever appeared on a TV programme with a French midget called Tattoo. The idea of me befriending anybody from France is utterly ridiculous. If I had the technical skill to do it, I would superimpose Ms Amy Carol's head on the body of Roseanne Barr and we'd see how she'd like that! A previous fraud involved a simian beast from Seattle who plonked a chef's hat on my head in order to amuse the blog-surfing public. This was most distressing. See below, the original "Fantasy Island" picture alongside the cunning handiwork of the North Carolina sex education specialist:-

Link to

"The Toxic Bullette"

- the ocean going orgy -

- notion spawned

by the said Amy Carol