Painting – Liam Creighton

18/03/2025 Culture, Painting

Faces in the Fire

Family business took me to Oxford at the weekend, so I took the opportunity to check out some bits of the Ashmolean. I was primarily interested in the Pre-Raphaelites (for writing reasons), but in the next room was this lovely canvas. Mid-Victorian and a lot more realist, Frank Holl’s Faces in the Fire shows a young servant girl, transfixed by what she sees in the fire just beyond the frame. It is so diverting that she seems to have forgotten about her duties.

Such simple and effective visual storytelling, helped by the title and the power of subtle suggestion, like the placement of the fire irons in the bottom right of frame and a few little bits of easily-read symbolism like the bird cage that, in combination with her simple clothing, reinforce the idea of her servitude. The muted colour palette and the detail around the hunched shoulders are just fantastic. An understated beauty of a painting.

26/02/2025 Culture, Painting

Psychoanalysing your dog

I visited the Surréalisme exhibition in the Pompidou centre just before Christmas. It was wonderful seeing some of the massively famous works like Magritte’s L’Empire des lumières (1954) and of course various bits of Dalí. But even better were the surprises – and in particular Dorothea Tanning‘s work, which has an invitingly dark humour about it. Her first major painting, Birthday (1942) stopped me in my tracks. It is a self-portrait, and Tanning’s plaintive look out of the canvas is a big part of the work’s affect.

Since then I’ve discovered that another of her paintings, Tableau Vivant (1954) hangs at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, so obviously I need to pay it a visit. Marcel Duhamel describes it as being “a bit like having psychanalyzed [sic] your dog, then illustrated the phase of ‘transference,’ to use the jargon.” Tanning replied that her dogs were loathe to be psychoanalyzed.

16/06/2024 Culture, Drama, Film, Painting, Spaces & Places, Travel Post a Comment

In Buñuel’s footsteps

I’m going to be in Toledo all next week attending the Conecta European TV networking event, and sticking around a couple of days afterwards for a little city break which will probably involve bicycles at some point.

When I mentioned to my friend Svitlana that I was going there, she told me the city was beloved by Luis Buñuel. A little digging, and it turns out before the Spanish Civil War, when they were all alive and on speaking terms, Buñuel, Dalí and Lorca visited Toledo and, “fascinated by the mysterious air it gave off,” were moved to invent their own semi-satirical religious order/artists collective, the Order of Toledo. More about it in this article by Roberto Majano.

The principle activity of the order was “to wander in search of personal adventures” and the induction ceremony was to be stranded alone in the darkness of Toldeo at the toll of the 1am bell. This reads to me very much like a precursor to the Situationist activity of dériving around Paris. Perhaps Guy Debord drew inspiration from Buñuel?

Bonus anecdote: Buñuel hired a sex worker in the city, not apparently for sex, but in order to hypnotise her, because surrealist research doesn’t have to answer to ethics committees.

02/06/2006 Culture, Davis, Film, Music, Painting, Snaps

Smoke from the big head tastes like marshmallows

Wide view of the inside of the cannery

Last night Jeff and I went to an art show in a cannery. The place has lain empty since 1999, and is due to be demolished in the next few days. Last night, however, it was turned over to a group of University of California art students to do with as they wished. They put on a show called Uncanny.

15/03/2006 Culture, Davis, Painting, Snaps

Dots

As promised, here’s a photo of my first painting. Click on it for a bigger view. I made this piece in response to the cafe manager, Alli, declaring that the only art on display in the cafe during the month of March would be created by the staff. As I couldn’t rig up a projector or a plasma screen I couldn’t contribute a piece of video art, so I had to think of another way of getting at least one image onto the wall.