Paintings are best viewed from a distance
Mahmoud In My Dinner Jacket
Thur
"Mahmoud In My Dinner Jacket" <bright...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:1140441004.8...@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> and if modern art, probably so far away that you can't see them.
>
What would be the best distance to view the paintings
that you prefer?
Point is that there is a distance where the painting disapears
into brushmarks and colours, and another where the subject
starts to lose detail over distance.
If you are going to display an artwork in a narrow hallway
where eyes are forced into a closeup view, then this becomes
a subject for consideration. This may be so especially with
some types of Impressionist works which are already
full of abbreviation, so that a fairly longer view than normal
would be appropriate.
Sometimes start to I think that I could accept Modern Art
if it were much better painted, then I think of Dali and
forget it.
--
Thur
rememberallthis
blog:
http://enlightenmentandart.blogspot.com
Friday, February 17, 2006
How to view my paintings
The best way to view my paintings is to position the painting and
yourself such that that your abdoment is inline with the lower part of
the painting (which is generally the most energetic part of my
paintings), and your eyes and forehead be inline with the top of the
painting.
I think this will allow your whole brain to view the painting. The
reasoning is that you see your body through the mapping of your body in
your brain. But this brain perception is not perfect, and inevitably,
there is a lot of interleaving of our surroundings into what you think
as your body, and yourself. Therefore, if you would position a painting
before your body and look at it that way, the various parts of the
painting could be interleaved and superimposed onto the various parts
of your body that your brain perceives as you. This way of viewing the
painting by allowing you and the painting to merge, so to speak, could
lead to better insight into the painting....
Mahmoud In My Dinner Jacket
> Sometimes start to I think that I could accept Modern Art
> if it were much better painted, then I think of Dali and
> forget it.
Dali copied the style of the Old Masters, so there's not much hope for
the rest, is there?
Thur
may be interpreted with a copy of a couple of good books
dealing with Pschoanalysis.
It seems his subject was the inner workings of his own mind
and what looks like self-obsession.
Now that's what put me off what seems to be paintings that
were taken a deal of care in creation.
--
Thur
Mahmoud In My Dinner Jacket
Expunging the ego and all that? At least Dali's paintings weren't so
unsubtle as that Mexican woman's, who put herself in every picture.
Mahmoud In My Dinner Jacket
Mani Deli
The Saturday Profile
After Stint of Crime, Art Forger Sells Genuine Fakes
By SARAH LYALL
FAIROAK, England
AFTER many years as an art forger, both criminal and legitimate, John
Myatt has a thing or two to say about the vagaries of the art market.
"Never was there such a load of rubbish talked about anything as has
been, and will be, talked about art," he said, sitting in his kitchen,
Van Gogh's beautiful "Harvest" (a fake, painted by him) on the wall
behind him. "The nonsense, really, is that paintings should be priced
the way they are, that a Van Gogh can go for, what is it, $75 million?
That's disgusting."
Former art student, former musician, former impoverished single
father, Mr. Myatt for seven years participated in what a Scotland Yard
officer called at the time "the biggest art fraud of the 20th
century," painting fake masterpieces that an accomplice passed off as
authentic. But all he really wanted, he said, was a job he could do at
home.
It was the mid-1980's, his wife had just walked out on him and their
two small children, and his job teaching art barely covered the baby
sitter's salary. By scaling back to two teaching days a week, Mr.
Myatt explained recently, he could combine forgery with childcare.
"Twelve and a half thousand pounds means I can get a car that works
and doesn't break down all the time," Mr. Myatt said, describing his
reaction to his first serious windfall. That was a fake Albert
Gleizes, which he whipped up in a matter of days and that sold for
£25,000 at Christie's (he split the proceeds with his accomplice, John
Drewe). "I can get nice clothes for my children instead of continuous
hand-me-downs."
Mr. Myatt used his knack for forgery and knowledge of art history to
produce fake after fake, more than 200 in all. Fake Giacomettis. Fake
Paul Klees. Fake Chagalls. Some sold for well over $150,000. (Only 80
or so have been recovered by the police; the rest are still at large,
although Mr. Myatt said he did not know where.) But while he provided
the art, it was the smooth-talking Mr. Drewe who drove the operation,
cooking up the ersatz provenances and handling the sales. In 1999, Mr.
Drewe was sentenced to six years in prison. Mr. Myatt, who pleaded
guilty to fraud and testified for the prosecution, served 4 months of
a 12-month sentence.
He makes an unlikely ex-convict.
He is so well regarded in this Staffordshire community, where he is
the organist and choir director at the local church, that when he was
in jail, his neighbors banded together and refurbished his kitchen.
Visitors to a recent London exhibit of his work — new works in the
style of famous artists with the words "Genuine Fake" written in
indelible ink on the back — included the foreman of the jury that
convicted him; his defense lawyer; and Jonathan Searle, the Scotland
Yard detective who arrested him and who, when Mr. Myatt got out of
prison, commissioned a portrait from him (as did a prosecutor in the
case).
Mr. Myatt now gives lectures on art forgery alongside officers from
Scotland Yard. At his London exhibit, he sold everything he displayed
— 68 fake Miros, Picassos, Giacomettis and the like — at prices from
$875 to more than $8,000. (The cheapest picture was a Myatt original,
titled "Ceci N'est Pas Une Magritte.") Besides the Van Gogh, Mr.
Myatt's house is chock-full of other fake great works — Matisses, Ben
Nicholsons, Braques. His studio is filled with half-finished Monets.
Now 60, trim, with thinning gray hair and a very dry sense of humor,
he talks forthrightly, but with a residue of shellshock, about his
life of crime.
AFTER studying art in college, Mr. Myatt discovered his talent for
forgery when, oddly enough, he was working as a songwriter in the
1970's. (His song "Silly Games" hit No. 1 on the British charts, but
that is another story.) His boss mentioned that he wanted to buy some
Raoul Dufy paintings, then worth more than $100,000 each.
But he didn't need to. "I painted a couple of Dufys for him," Mr.
Myatt said. His boss paid £250 apiece, slapped them in £600-pound
frames, and hung them up. "We all thought it was very funny," Mr.
Myatt said.
The get-solvent-quick potential of the enterprise appealed to him
later, when he was broke and wondering how to raise two children under
the age of 3. He placed an advertisement in the satirical magazine
Private Eye, offering legal forgeries for £250.
Everything was above board at first. Someone commissioned Mr. Myatt to
paint his father, a retired navy commander, in the style of Joshua
Reynolds. "We took a painting of some fabulous old guy gazing out with
lots of medals, and just changed the face," Mr. Myatt said. "He
thought it was brilliant."
There were many requests for Picassos and Van Goghs.
Then Mr. Drewe called, identifying himself as a physics professor who
wanted to dazzle his girlfriend with his new art collection. Mr. Myatt
painted more than a dozen pictures for him, at £250 each. The
enterprise crossed into illegality when Mr. Myatt painted the fake
Albert Gleizes that Mr. Drewe, without a word to Mr. Myatt, passed off
to Christie's as a family heirloom. From then on, Mr. Myatt supplied
the pictures and Mr. Drewe did everything else. He tipped cups of
black coffee on the works to make them look old. He put them in period
frames. He concocted false provenances and false explanations for how
he came to have them.
Mr. Myatt stayed willfully ignorant, unquestioningly accepting
whatever Mr. Drewe paid him.
Meanwhile, Mr. Drewe was getting weirder and weirder, Mr. Myatt said,
spinning stories about the royal family and Mossad. "And I thought,
this is the stupidest thing I've ever done." Having made about £90,000
in all (Mr. Drewe made about £1.5 million, prosecutors said), he told
Mr. Drewe he had had enough.
Scotland Yard came calling a year later as part of its larger
investigation into Mr. Drewe, whose by then ex-girlfriend had turned
him in.
"The judge was very nice and said all kinds of nice things about me
before sentencing me to prison," he said.
MR. MYATT passed his jail time drawing portraits of inmates and
guards. When he got out, he married his second wife, Rosemary, who
sings with him in the church choir and runs the increasingly
successful Genuine Fakes business. Michael Douglas has bought the
rights to his story.
What really gets to Mr. Wyatt is how easily his pictures fooled
everyone, even though he used inauthentic materials — household
emulsion instead of oil paint, for instance — and even though, he
says, much of the early work was pretty poor.
"The stupid thing is that the quality of the paintings is so much
better than when I was doing them with John Drewe," he said of his new
pieces.
He sees himself doing this for maybe five more years, and then
devoting himself to his own art.
"I want to go out and see if I can just forget about art and art
history and go out with a brush and try to do some honest painting,"
he said.
Until then, there is a new wrinkle to contend with, he said: an
unidentified forger who has been selling fake Myatts.