17 May 2015
Bread, art and metamorphosis
I just spent the past week learning how to bake bread properly, taught by an artisan baker. The effects were startling. Time passed unnoticed; the scraper became an extension of my body; and only by thinking of what it was like to be the dough d
26 Mar 2015
Ssh! The Secret of Picasso’s Ear
Ears make sense as one of the five: touch, taste, sight, sound and smell. But who thinks about Picasso's ears? We mostly remember his eyes: deep, dark and powerful. Yet he himself - as I don't think has been noted before - seems to have been very
03 Dec 2014
Claws, Paws and Prints
Many animals, like cats, dogs or the mythical griffin, have sharp claws. Let loose in a house, some of these charmers will engrave table legs, floor boards or virtually anything wooden. Artists who naturally have acute visual perception often re
09 Jan 2014 | 7 Comments
Keith Haring’s Secret Knowledge
EPPH has already shown how at least 7 major artists depicted themselves as lions (see below). There are more to come but many are by Old Masters and are quite subtle. Here’s an obvious example, an actual self-portrait, by an artist who was all
15 Dec 2013
Lotto’s Lion and The Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine
After the recent post about how Sir Edwin Landseer became a couple of dogs (seriously), I thought it would be a good idea to keep up the pace and show how Lorenzo Lotto became a lion. Near the lower edge of one of his greatest masterpieces, The
26 Nov 2013 | 2 Comments
Tips to Tell Art from Illustration
My definition of art, as I've said before, is not as wide as that used by the public and most scholars. I do not believe, for instance, that children create art nor the vast majority of adult painters. True artists paint themselves; they paint i
21 Sep 2013
Pens, Palettes and their Visual Metaphors
Thoth was an Egyptian god best known in art as having the head of an ibis (above left). He had many functions but was perhaps most celebrated as the scribe of the gods, the inventor of heiroglyphs and writing, and who, when people died, wrote do
08 Mar 2013
Dürer’s Foreign Language
"The art of painting cannot be truly judged save by such that are themselves good painters: from others, verily is it hidden, even as a strange tongue."
Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)1
If, as I believe, Dürer disguised
23 Mar 2012
Poems are Animals
A recent exhibition posted an interesting quote by the poet Ted Hughes. It was somewhat out of their context but in ours because I, of course, argue that true art is like a visual poem. Remember as you read it that although many published poems
30 Dec 2011
Carpaccio’s Dragon’s Blood
Carpaccio’s remarkable series of wall decorations on the saga of St. George in a small Venetian scuola captured my attention twelve years ago, at the start of my own quixotic quest to convince the art world that the subject of true art is
04 Nov 2011
Maurizio Cattelan at the Guggenheim
The Maurizio Cattelan exhibition opening today at the Guggenheim New York (on till Jan 22nd, 2012) is entitled All because it is meant to be a complete retrospective of the Italian artist’s career. In fact, aged 51, he has formally announc
17 Sep 2011
Artists are Animals
“Artists are animals” may seem like a derogatory statement but artists are animals and both art and intelligence are products of nature. We are not separate. We all play our part in the cosmos, all created by similar processes: rats,
09 Sep 2011
Murder and Butchery by Picasso and Chagall
A recent article on Chagal discusses his well-known identification with animals. It concludes with a drawing called The Butcher (top) which is so similar in meaning and method to Picasso’s The Murder (bottom), both drawn in the early 1930
30 Jul 2011 | 1 Comments
Titian is a dog
Some viewers remain convinced that artists subconsciously fused their features into their portraits of other people - as Leonardo misleadingly suggested - even though the evidence is now strong that face fusion was practiced consciously and with
27 Apr 2011
Ratatouille and the Great Masters (of all genders)
What do Raphael’s La Fornarina and Ratatouille have in common? Much more than you might think, their superficial differences disguising their fundamental similarity. The idea that significant art depicts a moment of its own making within t
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