Hey Mickey!

A lean period for bad hotel art, but then, like buses, two come along at once. Let's start with this delightful offering from the Netherlands;

Untitled (oil on canvas, ca 1m x 1m)

A first for the blog - this time the artist is actually known. Her name is Conny Roels, and she's a Belgian artist who has actually won awards and such. The hotel - a bland barracks on the outskirts of Eindhoven - was full of her art, along with a couple of other local artists, and some was priced up and clearly for sale (this one wasn't, sadly). Much of it wasn't too bad, but this one really struck me. It appears to be the severed head of Minnie Mouse, apparently in widow's weeds, on a yellow stick (or is that some unholy mouse goo dripping from her?). I'm sure it's supposed to tell us something, but I can't for the life of me work out what it is.

The second is not one of mine, but comes from a contributor on a trip to Italy:

(oil on canvas, unsigned)

I've seen worse, but all things are relative, as this is actually a copy of an original by Joshua Reynolds which hangs in the National Gallery in London. The original is a portrait of Banstre "Bloody" Tarleton, a British commander of the American War of Independence. This is what the Reynolds looks like:

So basically, someone has painted - and it is genuinely painted - a crude copy of Reynolds which fudges the image of the soldier behind him trying to hold on to the rearing horse, making it look like there are arms extanding from Tarleton's back, and which almost loses the cannon his foot is resting on, so that it looks like he's raised his leg to break wind in the horse's face. Bravo!

The Dancing Chicken

Oil on canvas.

This is from the same dismal place in Berlin that, three years ago, supplied us with entry no 2 in this blog. Here artist 'AV' has gifted us with a bleak field of stubble, a skeletal tree, two blue barns with poor perspective, an old babushka (or possibly a bear, who knows) with a massive pink scarf, and a huge, prancing chicken in the foreground.

Excitingly, it had a companion piece by the same artist, a muddy scene looking past a similar blue barn, or possibly farmhouse, towards a distant village with an even weirder, Hitchcockian perspective, where all of the houses have pink lights. It has that same kind of disturbing, Mitteleuropa quality as the Singing Ringing Tree and that Metz advert with the 'Judderman'. I was glad to get out of that room...