I was walking past the cathedral in Old Portsmouth a couple of weeks ago in my role as reluctant flaneur and saw the notice advertising the exhibition of the Portsmouth and Hampshire Art Society.A man assuming an attitude of leisure, I thought, ought to go in and have a look. I've been in before in previous years and it never dawned on me to enquire about actually buying a painting. The local artists are clearly good at what they do but I don't know much about art but I know what I like and, having only once or twice thought about acquiring an original artwork and then thought again, didn't expect to buy one from them.
But I must have been in a good mood and was arrested by this painting as soon as I saw it. It could do no harm, could it, I thought, to look at the catalogue and check the asking price. After all, I was well into a litany of recent winning horse racing bets (which has subsequently come to an end).
Yes, that's fine. I've won more than that this year but it does further delay the project of winning enough to justify buying the Buxtehude Complete Works.
I looked at it a bit more, thinking that if I could paint more than a childish motif of Lips & Bananas, this is what I'd like to do. Not every favourite poem or work than I admire makes me wish I'd done it myself but it is a special quality that suggests itself from time to time. It can even reach the stage where one believes one did have something to do with it because it couldn't have been so apt unless the artist had known as much.
The artist is Dave Brimage, about who I have been able to find out very little but even that adds to the mystique. None of his other paintings in the exhibition were like this. He appears to create a new picture every time he starts a new canvas, unlike some of us who write almost the same poem several times.
One can say more than is necessary about art and it is better to just enjoy something that one likes. But I have noticed compositional features about all the paintings I have on my walls, through years of increasing familiarity. Much of it is to do with the lines that make up the composition, which here line up with the 'disappearing point' up in the top left corner but what I understand from that is that most of the canvas is filled with reflected light from the wet road which is much brighter and emphasized over the real light from the buildings, car headlights and streetlights. Does that mean we should take from the painting the inference that one's distorted reflections on what is real are more powerful than that which is real. Whatever 'reality' is, we make more of it, or a different thing of it, in our skewed perception of it. I think that is probably right whether it was the artist's intention to express it or not.
But I'd be delighted to hear from the artist if he finds this. This year so far, I've only heard from a Latin scholar and a composer whose work I've reviewed so I'd be glad to hear from a painter.
I will hope to take a better picture in due course but in fading light, I had to do it from an angle to avoid a photograph that only reflected the flash.
I'm really glad I got it, for the painting itself to look at more than the fact that I can now, if I feel like it, bracket myself with that kind of wide boy that re-invests profit made from the turf into art.
