It doesn't take much for people to rumble that this was a wind-up but a wind-up with a serious side. I was trying to point out what I will always refer to as the pseud side of art. The colourful piece of rubbish was done by me on the computer and has absolutely no artistic merit whatsoever. In fact it took me under a minute to put together and launch to the world.
When in London I'm likely to gravitate to the National Gallery just off Trafalgar Square. I marvel at the paintings of the Renaissance, the vivid colours, the subject matter and the skill that went into those paintings. Modern art by and large leaves me cold, although I have to say I love Salvador Dali if he can be termed modern and also Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
But what I hate are canvases splashed with colour that claim to sum up the cataclysmic balance of nature with an apocalyptic view of every seismic occurrence since Noah left the ark. Art that re-affirms the balance of nature and happenstance with a view of the future as a past country. That is all absolute pseud twaddle.
I once saw a book entitled: "Why Your Five Year Old Could Not Have Done That - Modern Art Explained." I didn't venture into the pages of the book. I really didn't want to know because to my mind a five-year-old would be quite capable of producing some of the excruciatingly awful modern art that exists.
When I was a young reporter in Suffolk, I used to cover most of the art/music events. I did that because I loved the arts (and still do). Just a mile from where I was living at the time was an Art Studio at Ellingham Mill which was the home of an American artist by the name of Chester Williams.
Chester was a lovely man and I did a search on Google which told me that he was a co-founder of the Ellingham Mill Art Society along with his wife. Chester was born in Hollywood and educated alongside a number of children of film stars. He came to England during the Second World War and stayed, dying in 1986.
I also found the following details from an obituary in a national newspaper:
"Chester Williams was a painter of remarkable versatility. He could produce watercolours of the English countryside which, in their delicate allusiveness, suggested the work of Wilson Steer; hot, angular pictures of Middle East desert and mountain; and totally revealing, yet always sympathetic portraits of people ranging from Rebecca West and Svetlana Beriosova to a host of children."
"Born in Hollywood and educated at Hollywood High School, where a number of his schoolfellows were the children of film stars, Williams arrived in England during the Second World War to work on camouflage. Later, a beneficiary of the GI Bill of Rights, he attended the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Venice. In 1954 he went on to the Courtauld Institute in London. By now he was married to Lucy Halford, a brilliant industrial designer and director for many years of Lucy Halford Associates, the Mayfair public relations company.
"Together, they made a beautiful mill in Ellingham in Norfolk into a centre for modern art. They held exhibitions there, with people as eminent as John Piper and Leslie Waddington acting as their judges of prizes. Rarely a weekend seemed to pass in the summer when the many rooms of the mill were not full of guests."
So Chester was an eminent artist of his time.
It's interesting that the older one gets the more inquisitive we become. At the time of the art exhibition I am talking about I knew nothing of Chester's background. Now almost 50 years later I am delving into his history and learning something new and this is happening all the time. It could be a product of the internet which makes it so easy to find out about people and places. Similarly when I started this blog I had no intention of writing about Chester Williams who just somehow flew into my mind as I started writing.
So I went along to Chester's exhibition to do a review for the local newspaper and that's where the difficulty started. To me the exhibition had no or very little artistic merit. There was one painting that still stands out in my mind. It was of fish and it really did look like the work of a five-year-old. How could I review this because obviously it was an important exhibition but I hated it?
I can't remember exactly what I wrote but I'm sure I congratulated Chester on masterminding a brilliant exhibition of scintillating modern art. In other words I copped out and became part of the pseud group I so hated. But I certainly wasn't qualified to criticise something I really didn't understand.
Yes modern art leaves me cold. In the Picasso museum in his home town of Malaga there is a room which included furniture as art. One of the exhibits was an old style dresser - the kind of thing you might pay a tenner for at a car boot sale and use to put your tools in. But because it was in a museum it was art!
Many years ago we took the boys when they were young to an exhibition of modern art where it was difficult to tell what was the art and what was not. A ladder along a wall was art, a pile of bricks was art, a toilet seat was art but a portable radiator was there to heat the room. That made me sad because the radiator could have set-up a whole new category - art as a useful household gadget.
Then there was a load of coat hangers that could have been art or could have been to hang people's coats on. You can't mistake Renaissance Art. When it says The Birth of Venus by Botticelli you know that it does what it says on the tin and the painting will depict the birth of Venus.
Anyway the boys were less than impressed by the load of old tat they were looking at. By one door was an attendant with a peaked hat on. As we passed him our eldest was heard to say: "Dad this is a pile of s--t." The guard nodded his head and quietly said "yep."
I did come a cropper at an exhibition of Japanese Art in a London showroom. Actually it was in a famous auction house. I thought it might be a bit posh for us but they did have a nice little tea room, so were obviously happy for people like us to go in. So we had tea and cake and then had a look at the paintings, many of which were projected to make high six figure sums.
One was a rough wooden case with a description on the wall stating that it was expected to fetch £700,000 at auction. "Here we go again" I said to myself assuming that this was another abstract. I knew better, however, when two men in overalls came in.
"Shall we take this one out of its box now?" said one enquiringly.
he moral of this story is basically that with modern art you have no idea which is the art and which isn't.
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Yesterday I did a 10 mile round walk to Wymondham and back, taking some photos of Wymondham Railway Station which I have always loved. It used to be a riot of colour but isn't quite as well kept as it once was. Now two people including the owner of the Railway Bistro have adopted the station and would like to bring it back to its former glory. If they do it will be well stopping off to have a look at and there's still something very romantic about sitting in tea rooms at a station with trains stopping or thundering past. Incidentally the tea rooms is known as Brief Encounter after the film.