An Interesting Gift

I had a pleasant surprise last week when Vicky brought home a picture she had been given by friends.

The picture is a black and white sketch of a semi-naked lady draped in a towel revealing her shoulders, back and neck. A black marble-effect mount sets off the picture perfectly but the shiny gold frame may not be quite right for it.

We hadn't been given any information about what the picture is so, as we often do, we opened up the back. Inside we found it was a print of a pencil sketch entitled "Portrait Of Back" by Gilles Sacksick. Neither of us has come across this artist before and we wanted to find out more. This proved a bit of a challenge as he was born in Paris and most of the websites that have information about him are written in French.

Once we had made sense of the translations we were intrigued to find Gilles is a versatile artist. He produces traditional fine art paintings, drawings, illustrations and woodcuts covering a wide range of subjects from portraits and landscapes to animals and still life plus many other subjects. He has also worked on theatre sets and costume designs.

His work has been exhibited in Paris, London, New York and Tokyo as well as many other places around the world. We will now be on the lookout for other work by Gilles.

As for the picture, it would certainly benefit from a more complementary frame to replace the gold one it is in. And we are looking at all our display areas to find an appropriate place to hang it.

Many thanks to Vicky's friends for this interesting gift.

Vince,
Love Your Art

Letter To Santa

Dear Santa,

We are looking forward to Christmas very much and have been very good boys and girls all year. We have built a worthy collection of art and supported several charity shops at the same time. We haven't written nasty things about controversial artists or their beds and we haven't knocked over any expensive Chinese vases.

Please stop at our house on Christmas Eve. We will leave you two mince pies and a glass of sherry as well as a saucer of milk for Rudolph.

Here is our list:

Tickets to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, inclusive of flights from Heathrow Airport. We want to have a thorough look round the gallery so we will also need two weeks accommodation at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Plus a bit of spending money for the shops.

An art lesson from Banksy. This will let us decorate the outside of our house in a stunning fashion and increase the value of our home by about ten million times!

The Tate Art Collector card game. This will keep the family occupied when they visit and with our superior knowledge of art we will always win!

Finally a picture of sunflowers to brighten up the Winter days. The one by Van Gogh looks quite nice and we will make every effort to find a space on our wall for it.

Finally, finally, a year's supply of Pringles crisps so we have something to nibble on as we admire our own little art collection.


Vicky and Vince,
Love Your Art

Greetings To You All

Greetings cards come in all shapes, sizes and subjects. And looking in any card shop, you now find more and more often that some of these cards are based on paintings and other art.

Combining these cards with a cheap photo frame can give you a simple and quick way to decorate your walls with art for probably not much more than a fiver each. And if you pick up the frames for a pound or two in your friendly, local charity shop, you get even better value.

So we're always on the lookout for interesting greetings card on our travels. We already have a triple frame in our living room displaying a set of three cards from Sam Toft's Mustard family collection. And a couple of framed sheep scenes we found in a charity shop turned out, on closer investigation, to be the fronts of Christmas cards.

We have also recently discovered a series of cards with humorous pen and ink sketches by Glockwork. Drawn by Graham “Glock” Ashbridge, these cards include motorcycling, steam trains, life in the Yorkshire Dales and, to our delight, sheep (see picture).

So far, we only have one Glockwork card but we suspect it will form the basis of a mini-collection of these charming sketches. The cards are available in shops across the North of England (plus some South of the Humber) or on the Glockwork website.

Love Your Art,
Vicky and Vince