Roger's Art Page

This page is basically to allow exploration into the various aspects of my interests in art. In addtion to providing links to interesting art sites around the net, you may examine some of my own paintings if you wish.

I enjoy painting in watercolour and acrylics, mostly landscapes, including miniatures. I also enjoy some modern art, although I find it "interesting", rather than something to hang on the wall, although this might change if I lived in a different sort of house!

A newer facination is the use of the computer to generate images; my feeling is much the same as my feeling for computer generated music - much seems sterile, and yet the possibilities of using the machine are endless. I have added a computer art page to experiment and provide onward links.

My Taste In Art

Art is like music in that different styles/images move me in different ways at different times. So it is impossible to say I have a "favourite" picture, any more than I have a favourite piece of music. But it is true to say I have favourite artists, even though I may not always like their work, or exclude the work of those who are not my favourites.

My current top 'old masters' are Vermeer and Georges de la Tour (not yet found on the net!), although I would be hard pressed to say why. I like much Dutch painting, particularly interiors and still life. I would like to go to the Vermeer exhibition currently touring, but don't think I can afford it at the moment.

I was fortunate enough to visit the Metropolitan Museum in New York a few years ago, and found it stunning, but somewhat overpowering. So many pictures that I had seen only in books! There was a corridor lined with Degas' works, but by the time I had arrived at the end I had more than enough of ballet dancers. On the same trip to New York, I went to the Museum Of Modern Art, where they were showing a Picasso/Braques retrospective. Again, the sheer volume of works actually detracted from my pleasure at being there. I got bored! Not something that is likely to happen with Vermeers....

Amongst more modern representational styles, I love the voluptuous paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites and English watercolour landscapes, and the tongue-in-cheek imagery of Rene Magritte.

Magritte is one of my favourites, a man who did not want to be called a "Surrealist" painter, and yet lived a curious mixture of surrealistic and ordinary lifestyle. He said that the ideas in his paintings were more important than the actual pictures. The jazz singer George Melly, who is a collector and authority on Magritte, recounts a number of amusing stories about Magritte's behaviour.

I also appreciate the vibrancy of the colours of Mattisse and the work of the bauhaus school of design - not just pictures. M.C.Escher is another artist whose ideas are, in a way, greater than his work; I have a book of his life and works by J.L.Locher ("Escher - The Complete Graphic Works") which makes fascinating reading. Here was a man who lived a very ordinary life compared with most artists, and yet produced images of considerable power, and was held in high regard by mathemeticians and scientists, for his ability to view the world from an unusual and scientifically interesting viewpoint.

At the Metropolitan Museum, I enjoyed the pictures by Pollock and Lichtenstein et al, but they need a huge space in which to be appreciated properly - I don't think I have a single wall in the house that would be large enough to take any one of them.

I like some abstract work - my wife and I visited the Barbara Hepworth gallery recently at St. Ives, which is laid out in the garden of her house and studio. The sculptures fit well in the surroundings, see example, but you are supposed not to touch them! I feel that touching them is an essential part of enjoying their existence. We also went to the Tate gallery that day, where they had more Hepworths, but my favourite sculptures at the Tate were done by Dennis Mitchell. Mitchell was Barbara Hepworth's assistant from 1949 to 1959. Here is Mitchell's Turning Form (1959).