Why I like art...(well, a lot of it)

The Fall of Icarus by Bill Hammond

I like the way art in general encourages us to explore the possibilities of how we might see the same thing in many ways, depending on the fall of light, the attention we give it or the things that have influenced us.

Repeating life in art becomes a means of holding onto the image. It enables us to access frozen moments that we have forgotten as they pass into memory, fragments we store, misremember and recall when we’re least expecting them.

Abstractionism enables artists and their audiences to get away from linear perspective and a consistent viewpoint and see multiple views of a single object. The artist is doing what the viewer does in his or her mind's eye. They’re constructing the unknown, and the imagined, from the known.

Fish by Constantin by Brancusi

With sculpture, I often get the sense that all the smoothing and rounding and ­hollowing of great, abstract sculptural forms, even their facelessness, has a point. There is a sense of great gravity and rest. The sculptures slow time down to a full stop, and us with it. Critically, the artist needs to let the material do the talking and respect its nature. 


Whilst in painting, an exaggerated use of colour or form often conveys an emotional response to a subject rather than a faithful representation of it that in some way is so much more impactful. 

It's  a tough one to choose just ten artworks that mean something to me. I'll give it a go though. These are not my top ten 'favourites' (which seems too whimsical an exercise), or what I consider to be the top ten 'seminal' or 'greatest' works in the world, but rather those that mean a lot to me and I wouldn't want to live without.

                                                                   Top ten:

The Last Judgement by Hieronymus Bosch

- Fish by Constantin Brancusi

- Guernica by Pablo Picasso


- The Last Judgement by Hieronymus Bosch


- The Fall of Icarus by Bill Hammond


- Tangata whenua by Baye Riddell

- Sfera con Sfera ("Sphere Within Sphere") by Arnaldo Pomodoro

- The Cloud Gate sculpture (also known as "The Bean" by Anish Kapoor

- Primavera by Sandro Botticelli 

- A painting I can't remember the name of by Ben Nicholson ;-)

- Composition VI by Wassily Kandinsky