Sometimes I come back to a picture with a new idea, usually to add something - such are the wonders of Photoshop - despised I know by many purists but manna from heaven to someone like me who never knows when to stop. In this case I have tinkered with a 2006 picture called...
Please lock me away...... Danae was sent to the tower to protect her virtue; in an ivory tower intellectuals are supposed to argue over how many angels one can fit on the head of a pin; and those searching for a bit of unworldly peace to write that novel, scan their slides, write a song...
It occurred to me one afternoon in Paris what made some female nudes shocking - it depends on what they are wearing, or, on their hair. The occasion was the Felix Vallatton exhibition in January. The artist was perhaps best known for his curious conversation pieces of couples in which the...
In London over Christmas I paid a visit to the London Museum with my wife and 10 year old daughter and what did we run across quite unexpectedly? This, the actual placard that the so called Protein Man paraded up and down Oxford St, London for 25 years. His name was Stanley Green, a...
On a recent visit to Paris I thought I must see Marat's original bath tub in which he was stabbed by Charlotte Corday on July 13, 1793, in the Grévin Wax Museum. The tableau, one of the oldest in the museum, purports to show the scene immediately after the stabbing. The bathtub, which...
I have taken to photographing the Belle in places that I have known of for some time, trusting that the beauty of the site, what the Romans called Genius Loci, will inspire both me and the model even though I may not have a very well formed idea of what I intend to do at the outset. I set...
I have just finished the first biography I have ever read of a photographer, the Canadian Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002)*. So well known in the immediate post-war period that to have one's portrait taken by him was referred to as being 'Karshed'. He was an émigrée from Armenia, a survivor of...
Do artists still work from poetry? In the past it was common for a painter to be inspired by the poets, but is there poetry in Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' (AKA The Pickled Shark) ? I ask this as I have just finished a biography of Samuel...
I am going to permit myself a bit of a rant. Be warned, as I know I'm going to appear to be a snob, so whether you agree or not please leave a comment. The Italians say that you need a signore to make good wine - in other words a peasant isn't capable. Well I'd go a bit further....
I was on my annual visit to the Bologna Art Fair recently and I thought if I see another art work titled "Untitled" then I am going to go on a visual strike and just not pay any more attention to the art work. This diatribe of mine was triggered by seeing a photograph on a blog that...
Fuseli, German Romantic 2007 Fuseli: a German romantic, a lover of Shakespeare and the Gothic, friend of Blake, a painter of remarkable sensibility and psychological perception, a forerunner of the Symbolists. Nightmare, of which he did several versions, was something of an obsession. Perhaps he...
This photo was taken in 1989 and inspired not by work of art but an aftershave advertisement. I have blogged it because this picture taken over 20 years ago has become topical. The caption reads, 'Men's Perfume, Stories about Women'. I built a set as best I could with five friends...
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