Kevin's Watch

If you had the pick of any painting in the world, to have transported to your home, for you to enjoy ( not to sell), what would it be?

I'm going to cheat n my very first answer, because I'd choose not a single painting, but the entire Chauvet cave system with all of it's beautiful art, contours and delicate crystal tracery for me to be able to contemplate at leisure. The single sweeping line of the lion (the first, and best single line painting ever done), the panel of the horses, the oxen drinking from the well - I love them all!

But back to the real world ....... for me it would have to be Rousseau's painting 'Suprised' (I've spoken of my love of it before). I have a high grade framed copy of it already, but anyone who has seen the light shining forth from the impressionist masterpiece's in Paris will understand the difference between even the best prints and the original paintings. Suprised is a naive work of consumate skill (and Rousseau was untrained) that quite simply throws activity at you in a single flash of exposed intent. I can drop my eyes on the painting and rest them there for as long as it takes.

Now, what's your choice? Take your pick, whatever you want!

Norman Rockwell

Southern Justice

Wow, that is not an easy choice. The first thing that comes to mind is a painting I saw on Etsy a few years back, by a musician I like who is also a prolific painter. I don't always care for his paintings, but this one stuck in my mind. It was a woman in a red cloak, standing with her back to a wall. She was holding up a phosphorescent lantern, and there was the shadow of a huge wolf looming over her. It was the expression on her face that made it notable, because I think everyone would read it differently - she could have been frightened, or defiant, or resigned - I think it would depend on your mood.

Damn, that's a tough one.

It's either got to be a Dali, (Maybe The Temptation of St Anthony or The Hallucinogenic Toreador) or Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

--A

Winslow Homer's "The Gulf Stream"

I really didn't want to pick something famous because I don't think I'd want to be responsible for the original. But hey, it's a fantasy, so I might as well fantasize about my ceiling not leaking.

Geza Farago's painting of a cat and a woman looking up at the sky. I don't know the story behind it, but I like to imagine the cat was there first and the woman came along and was trying to figure out what the cat was staring at. (And the cat was probably thinking 'made you look' because cats do that.)

I couldn't remember the name of the painting, but apparently it's just Slim Woman with a Cat.

So imaginatively titled...

One of my favourite painting titles is Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening

--A

Wow, what a great selection! I love Sorus' woman and cat and the gulf stream is so pertinent to what is happening in Europe. Southern Justice is almost too hard to look at, and Dali!!! Thanks a bunch guys!

Kandinsky : Composition VIII

Awesome Sarge; in my earlier days I did a couple of Kandinsky style works (very badly I promise) because it seemed a technique that even I could somewhat replicate. I shortly learned that drawing lines, circles and triangles on a page, does not a Kandinsky make!

I have a reproduction in my office.

Pretty nice. Not familiar with the artist.

--A

It's clearly a landscape - isn't it?

I saw a program on still life painting the other night that has upped my respect for the genre big time. Caravaggio said he expended as much sweat over a simple piece of fruit as he did over any human form ....... and in his great 'basket of fruit' painting it shows! Why still life should be so at the bottom of people's list is much down to the effects of art criticism on the general thinking of the masses - but it's unjustified: as the program shewed, still life has actually been at the front of many pivotal moments in art history.

peter wrote:It's clearly a landscape - isn't it?

Now that you mention it, it could be...didn't occur to me before you mentioned it though.

--A

I was thinking it looked like a piece of sheet music that gained sentience during a solar eclipse, but it could be a landscape.

I thought it was math...

Most things are.

I see the sun and moon, mountains and buildings to the fore; probably reflective of a deep seated need to establish order into a chaotic world if we want to get Freudian..........

Sorus wrote:Most things are.

I win the internets then.

Interestingly now I've fixed it as landscape in my mind, I can no longer see it as not being so. The math interpretation, which I entirely get, I can't actually see.