I've been haunted by this opinion for a while now, since I heard it expressed by Ian Lee on the In it for the Monet programme, or something like that, on TV some months ago - I don't even remember what channel it was on. I puzzled over the statement for a while, wondering if he was right - Lee does, after all, say some quite sensible things on his The Jackdaw website - before grasping that he was just trying to let a rather poor amateur painter down gently. OF COURSE real artists paint elephants; and dogs; and tigers - described by one of the loathsome Chapman brothers as Prozac in paint - and anything else they want to paint or draw. And it has nothing to do with Lee, or the art market generally, or critics.... artists paint what artists want to paint, whatever the West End galleries think, insofar as they actually do think at all rather than clambering feverishly onto the latest bandwaggon: Rembrandt painted pigs, Stubbs painted horses - artists paint what they want to paint, and art critics natter, carp, fill column inches and blogspots and hope some fool or other will take note of their wittering even though, faced with the challenge of drawing so much as a cardboard box, they'd fail miserably and humiliatingly. There's a charcoal drawing of elephants on the gallery today which is worth a thousand columns of gaseous exhalation by Ian Lee or any other critic.