Definitions of Painting and Art

Oh, Michael that made me laugh. It now throws a whole new light on what we’re all doing! Ellen

I thought the two definitions were funny. Here's something else which might interest readers. It's the history of art in half a page, which I found in a novel, Us, by David Nichols. For copyright reasons I've not typed out the whole of it, but this is enough to give you an idea. "Cave paintings. Clay then bronze statues. Then for about 1,400 years, people painted nothing except bold but rudimentary pictures of either the Virgin Mary and Child or the Crucifixion. Some bright spark realised that things in the distance looked smaller and the pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Crucifixion improved hugely. Suddenly everyone was very good at hands and facial expression and now the statues were in marble. Fat cherubs started appearing, while elsewhere there was a craze for domestic interiors and women standing by windows doing needlework. Dead pheasants and bunches of grapes and lots of detail. Cherubs disappeared and instead there were fanciful, idealised landscapes, then portraits of aristocrats on horseback, then huge canvases of battles and shipwrecks………….(goes on a bit more)……..Someone signed a urinal and it all went mad. Neat squares of primary colours were followed by great blocks of emulsion, then soup cans, then someone picked up a video camera, someone else poured concrete and the whole thing became hopelessly fractured into a kind of confusing, anything goes free for all." The novel, Us, is a bittersweet novel (I'm quoting the publisher) about love and family, husbands and wives, parents and children. It was a follow up to the bestseller One Day.

I think they are all pretty accurate descriptions of how e spend our time!