Confessions of an Art Lover

Confessions of an Art Lover ©

By Michael Casey

I like Art, I suppose in a way I love it. My mum bought a picture printed on cardboard, it’s a street scene in snow, cost her 10p at a jumble sale. I still have it, it’s hanging over my bed, I’ve had it for 46 years maybe. That one thing has influenced my life till now and forever.

I even bought a book on Art while I was on holiday in Exeter with my brother, it was a 3 day weekend with hotel and car hire thrown in. He had named a locomotion engine and the holiday was the prize. So if ever you see “the graduate” that’s the train named by my brother. The art book was on sale and we got another quid off because there was a mark on the front inside page. I still have that book, it’s behind the telly.

I was just watching Andrew Graham-Dixon on tv, his programmes educate me. He’s been talking about artists from 100 years ago who were trail blazers, England’s version of Picasso if you like. Though that’s a very large over simplification.

The thing with art is its art, it’s not a photograph, it has many more meanings than a bare polaroid. Artist love the female form, the female nude is everywhere in art, and the internet in today’s world. Artists get bored with just one version of anything, so they stretch and strain the images. Look at some of Gaudi’s work for example, then look at Picasso’s, the form, the image on the canvas is changed and mangled even.

It’s as if the artist is drunk or looking through a kaleidoscope, or looking at a refection an image through a broken mirror. Nothing is as it seems it’s all been changed. The female form was corpulent and fat long ago, it was the tradition, then with time and different schools of art the nude was presented differently.

Everything, the landscape, the way of painting everything has changed, we had Constable so millions of copies of the Haywain adorn millions of homes. We had Turner with a blob of spit in the centre of an angry sea swell. We had the Pre-Rafaelites too with their almost cartoon bright colours, by the way Birmingham city gallery has a great collection of them.

Time and Tide wait for no man, ditto the artist. That’s why I need my guide Andrew Graham-Dixon to explain it all to me, and to help make the penny drop. Some may follow Man United, some may follow Formula One, others follow the still a Brit Murray at the tennis. Me I did play rugby at school, but I’d just love to sit down to dinner with Andrew Graham-Dixon and a  60 inch HD4 tv  set beside us.

As we enjoy our meal, cooked by AGD’s Italian friend I could be taught the History of Art, I have a large stomach so I could be deeply educated. The length and breadth of art, as well as the 16 course menu that would cover the table as I look up and learn my Art.  

Perhaps I am just naïve, but a painting on the wall does turn a house into a home, and if you understand all the nuances of the painting then so much the better. It’s like being on holiday abroad and being able to understand the language. Art is more than pretty pictures, it is a language, which is even better if you understand it.

as you can see I like my art, that's a copy of a Burne-Jones above the piano, it was a leaving present