The Journey by Peter Fuller, 1990

I am aware that this sounds arrogant and, no doubt, discourteous to the artists concerned, but then serious criticism is often that way. And, after all, such criticism itself springs out of a ‘journey’. As it happens, I agree with Gilbert, one of the contributors to Oscar Wilde’s famous dialogue on, ‘The Critic as Artist’. Gilbert argues that higher criticism is ‘the record of one’s sole’. He goes on to describe it as ‘the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind’. - Read more

 

Aesthetics & State Of Patronage

The recent history of art has posed – or perhaps has seemed to pose – a new set of problems for those concerned with aesthetic evaluation. Considerable prominence has been given to ‘Works of Art’ of a kind which has not previously been seen: that is, works which apparently embody no imaginative (or indeed physical) transformation of materials; no sense of belonging to any of the particular arts – like painting, sculpture, drawing, engraving, or whatever; no sense of tradition, nor of skill. Such works possess no identifiable aesthetic qualities, and offer no aesthetic experience. - Read more

 

 

Cecil Collins

I have been haunted by Cecil Collins’s painting, Wounded Angel, ever since I first saw it in an exhibition of his work in Plymouth in 1983.  The picture is included in the artist’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery.  The foreground is filled with the figure of an angel lying like an injured dragon-fly in front of a sumptuous purple mountain, which reaches up towards an orange sky.  On the horizon, a burning sun slowly rises.  As always with Collins, the quality of the painting itself is impeccable. - Read more

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