A couple of things inspired this week’s post which is about artists and their paintings. Artist David Hockney is eighty something years old this year and has just opened a new exhibition of his work in Paris. He was invited by the art museum, Fondation Louis Vuitton, to mount a retrospective of his work focussing on the last 25 years of his artistic output as well as featuring some of his early works and some new ones too.

I remember once watching a documentary about Hockney many years ago with my father and it featured some of his paintings which were done in a rather childish way and my dad looked at me and asked ‘were these what he did as a child?’ Clearly, David Hockney didn’t do it for my dad.

My favourite works of David Hockney were actually not paintings but his Cameraworks in which David took numerous pictures of his subject and then created really inspired collages from the prints.

On 15 November 2018, Hockney’s 1972 work Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie’s auction house in New York City for $90 million (£70 million), becoming the most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at auction. Hockney will be 88 in July of this year.

LS Lowry is a northern painter who is famous for his stylised pictures of Salford and Manchester and their mills and factories. He spent most of his life in Pendlebury in Salford and I remember reading a story about him years ago in which another north west painter took Lowry on a visit to the countryside. They set up their easels and brushes looking out on a beautiful rural scene and began to paint. After a while the painter, it might have been Sheila Fell although I’m not sure, got up to look at Lowry’s canvas and was surprised to see not the beautiful surrounding countryside but a northern street that might have been Salford or Manchester.

Clearly, you could take the man out of Salford but not Salford out of the man.

Not long ago I heard about a new film starring Tomothy Spall as Lowry and Vanessa Redgrave as his mother. The film was called Mrs Lowry and Son and to be fair, I found it rather disappointing. It’s not Lowry’s life story but focusses on his relationship with his mother who according to the film was bed bound and was looked after by Lowry who then went up to the attic to paint when she had gone to sleep. She died before her son found fame as a painter.

Today, his name is remembered at the Lowry Art Gallery in Salford Quays where many of his paintings are exhibited.

Jack Vettriano was a painter who I had always thought was an American as his paintings have a sort of cinematic style which I mistakenly assumed came from the USA. In fact, Vettriano was a Scottish painter and gained international recognition with his work The Singing Waiter which became one of the bestselling art prints in the UK. Liz bought me a framed print for a Christmas or birthday present some years ago which hangs in our dining room in St Annes. According to Wikipedia, the original was sold in 2004 to a private bidder for £744,500.

Vettriano was a self-taught artist and his paintings frequently show elegantly dressed figures in ambiguous or intimate settings and his works have met with a mixed reception with some critics dismissing him as populist, whatever that means. Personally, I have always loved his work and my art page over on Pinterest is filled with many of his pictures. He himself said his paintings were inspired by “25 years of sexual misbehaviour”.

Vettriano had homes in Scotland, London and the south of France and he passed away at his home in Nice earlier this year on March 1^st.

Many people have compared Vettriano’s work with that of another artist, Edward Hopper. Hopper was an American artist. He was born in 1882 in Nyack, New York. He studied at the New York School of Art where he developed his particular style with an emphasis on solitude, light and shadow. I’ve always thought that his work has a sort of art deco style, similar to magazine illustrations of the 1920s.

Hopper made his first sale in 1913 when he was 31. He hoped this might have been the start of numerous sales but his work took many years to catch on with buyers. His most famous work is Nighthawks which he finished in 1942. He worked for many years as an illustrator for magazines and advertising companies. In 1918 he was awarded the US Shipping Board prize for a war poster titled Smash the Hun. Sales began to take off in 1923 and the resulting financial stability enabled Hopper to continue to create art. He died in 1967.

An artist that suffered criticism in the same way as Jack Vettriano was Margaret Keane. I think I had seen her pictures floating about the internet but I knew nothing about her until watching a film about her life. The film Big Eyes starred Amy Adams as Margaret who is an illustrator at a furniture factory. At an outdoor art show she meets painter Walter Keane. The two hit it off and later marry. Keane rents wall space in a nightclub to exhibit his and Margaret’s paintings but he gets into a fight after finding the paintings are displayed by the bathrooms. The fight becomes headline news in a local newspaper and the resulting publicity brings people in to see the pictures that started the fight.

The newspaper stories mistakenly credit Walter as the artist responsible for the popular pictures of people with oversized eyes. Walter convinces Margaret to go along with the deception as he thinks he can market the paintings better while Margaret creates more. The two open a gallery together and sell cheap prints of Margaret’s paintings which are hugely popular. Later the two split up and Margaret has to sue to be recognised as the artist of her Big Eyes pictures.

The film was directed by Tim Burton who is a great fan and collector of Margaret’s work. Like Vettriano, some in the art world have been critical of Margaret’s work but it has been praised by none other than Andy Warhol saying “I think what Keane has done is just terrific. It has to be good, if it was bad, so many people wouldn’t like it.”

Margaret Keane died in 2022 aged 94.

I think I might finish with a few of my favourite pictures.

I’ve always rather liked this painting of Lenin by Isaak Brodsky which shows Lenin in front of the Smolny Institute which was a girls’ school until taken over by the Bolsheviks in the Russian October Revolution. Brodsky was born in 1884 in the Ukraine and painted Lenin and many other Soviet politicians.

Edvard Munch was born in 1863 and painted the famous picture known as The Scream in 1893. The Scream has become a hugely powerful image symbolising the anxiety of the human condition.

Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch painter born in 1853 and described in Wikipedia as one of the most influential figures in western art. He died in 1890 after shooting himself in the chest. The wound was not immediately fatal but he succumbed to infection. His last words were apparently ‘the sadness will last forever.’ My favourite of his paintings is Cafe Terrace at Night painted in 1888.

Finally, I wondered what must be the most famous painting ever and it surely must be the Mona Lisa. The artist was Leonardo Da Vinci and it was produced sometime between 1503 and 1506 and is a portrait of an Italian noblewoman named Lisa del Giodono. According to Wikipedia it is “the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about and the most parodied work in the world.”

It currently hangs in the Louvre in Paris.

What is your favourite painting?

---

Thanks to Wikipedia for all the facts and figures used above.

---

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry collection.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.