There are many reasons to like an artist or an artist’s particular work and here is an example. I knew I was going to be an artist. I liked, as a young boy, the idea of being an artist. It wasn’t just about wanting to paint. So, at some point, I don’t remember precisely but probably in the 70′s, I watched a matinee on TV called ‘The Horses Mouth’. I wanted to watch it as I recognised the title from a Joyce Carey book in my burgeoning orange Penguin collection. I also liked the director Ronald Neame from films like ‘The Third Man’. This film was made in the late 50′s and starred Alec Guinness as an artist called Gulley Jimson. It’s totally cliched and a bit of a satirical comedy romp and I never quite got Alec Guinness’s exaggerated voice. Gulley is looking for the ‘perfect wall’ to paint…. (you can guess or look here). But what did get me were the paintings. To my aspirations to be an artist, but with little direction, they were awesome. Anyway, a few years later I tracked down the artist who made them and it was John Bratby. Bratby was a founder of the ‘Kitchen Sink’ movement of artists (like yesterday’s post, an artist from the age of austerity after the war) famed for their depiction of dreary domestic scenes. He fell out of favour when Pop Art came along which is a shame as I think the whole period fascinating. Little art which preceded this movement depicted so piercingly the banality of life and therefore the democratisation of common culture.