Ars Gratia Artis

This morning I walked the dogs down by the village pond. While doing so, I noticed an artist just opposite, outside the pub, seated at an easel. She was obviously attempting some sort of acrylic representation of the scene. And why not? It’s very picturesque. I therefore went over in order to have a look and offer a few words of artistic criticism. Not total crap, I said, but it needed a lot of work. Then off I went again, leaving her to absorb my wisdom.

Anyhow, an hour or so later, I sauntered back and took another look at the by now nearly finished painting. And my opinion this time? Unrealistic garbage, I’m afraid.

Don't get me wrong, I told her. As far as being an accurate representation of the ponds and its environs, it was spot on. However, that's all she'd painted, which was the problem. You see, it takes two to three hours to paint one of these things. But what would happen if, to use an obvious analogy, she'd taken a photograph whose exposure time was three hours? The motionless things, like trees and houses, would come out OK. But anything that was moving during the exposure would come out blurred, of course. So, given that it took me some five minutes or more to cross the artist's field of vision, I should have been recorded as a multi-coloured blur going from one end of the painting to the other. Not a sign, though. Not just of me, but of ducks, cars, other pedestrians, and in fact anything else that was moving at the time.

Thinking further on this, perhaps it would have been a better idea if, instead of taking several hours to do the work, she’d taken her thumb out of her arse and painted the scene much more quickly. Ten minutes, for instance, and then the moving objects in the picture would only have been very slightly blurry but nonetheless identifiable. Or, better yet, if there had been a team of artists – a dozen say – each could have contributed a separate element to the picture, the joint effort allowing the whole thing to be painted in just a fraction of a second, thus creating a true “snap shot.” Indeed, had there been a coach party of sixty or so artists, they might have been able to paint ten canvases between themselves in under a second. Then these could have been bound together, allowing the viewer to flick through them with his thumb, thus producing a true moving picture, as in one of those children's "flick books".

You may recall that Leonardo da Vinci and colleagues used this very technique for their famous “Mona Lisa Flashes Her Tits” animated sequence, unfortunately only one frame of which survives today.

Whatever, as I'm on the subject of art, perhaps I should mention that I am, in fact, something of an artist myself. I am currently going through a post impressionist phase. Here is my impression of a post: