There's an article in yesterday's Telegraph about a 78 year old woman living in Hay-on-Wye who paints pictures and is now selling them. Small scale things, colourful, bright, cheery, she now has a following. Indeed Arnold Wesker, the playwright, has a collection of her works. She has no gallery, she paints in her house, and exhibits her work in a bookshop. When people visit the bookshop, the owner has said, they usually buy a Jean Miller. Shown in the article is a picture of a bowl of flowers, another of a sheep in a pink field with green trees and a pink mountain.
I couldn't help thinking of Jeff Koons who creates monstrosities that are, so to speak, at the other extreme end of art, the end of installations, of sharks in tanks, of unmade beds, and so on. Koons is in my view the King of such modern art.
But let me allow the fine critic Robert Hughes to have his say on him: "We decided to put Jeff Koons in the new programme (TV's "Shock of the New") not because his work is beautiful or means anything much, but because it is an extreme and self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big bucks..... He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is you can't imagine America's singularly depraved culture without him."
I'm off to Hay-on-Wye next month for the Festival of Literature - but my main reason is to see, and maybe buy, a Jean Miller lanscape.
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