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Pompeii

The very creative fiscal manager in this cartoon is George Osborne, current Chancellor of the UK. The emperor is, of course, David Cameron. Sniffing around for an angle, I looked up the name of the Roman emperor in charge the year Vesuvius erupted. It just so happened that in 79 AD there was a change of emperors, from Vespasian to Titus. Who was in charge the day the lava started flowing? I looked it up (Oh  please be Titus! Please be Tightarse!) It was Tightarse! Unfortunately I ran out of room and had to forego that route. Ahh….say lovee.

 An aside – I never know whether to use BC/AD or BCE/CE for dating. For an update on who’s winning the BC/AD – BCE/CE war, see here. I believe it should be the latter as it’s slightly weird looking at ancient Buddhist statues labelled 300 BC, but if I’m worried about confusing the reader I’ll go with BC/AD. After a careful assessment I have used caution with you, dear reader.

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Richard Diebenkorn

One of my favourite artists is Richard Diebenkorn. There is so much I could say about him (and probably will on this blog, given time) but today I will limit myself to this. Something especially appealing about his work is the sense of layers, of even more stuff happening below the surface, occasionally glimpsed, occasionally hidden. I’ve tried many times to explain to myself the nature of the appeal. Was it because it showed the creative process in action – actions and their revisions, a fascinating groping towards a successful conclusion? I am sure this is part of it but it never felt like an adequate answer. However, recently I read (in “The Art Instinct” by Denis Dutton) that from an evolutionary perspective there are certain features of a landscape that seem to be innately appealing to people everywhere. It’s a fascinating list, and one of them is what follows. The environmental psychologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan have stressed that, in a landscape, we have…

‘a preference for an element of mystery, which they define as a feeling that “one could acquire new information if one were to travel deeper into the scene” – following a path or looking around a bend….. More than any other component of landscape characteristics, mystery stirs the human imagination and as such is vitally important to landscape as an artform.’

If we do have an instinctive love of mystery then this is probably a better explanation for the appeal of Diebenkorn’s layers. There is a sense that there is more here than we can quite grasp.