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...

The Human Stain

Again apologies for a few lean months. I did stay in a French chateau in July that had some very troubling artworks, but that was a holiday, not business, and not really a hotel, so I don't think it really counted.

This, on the other hand...

Poster paint on card.30cm x 50cm

This is from my bathroom in a room at the InterContinental San Francisco. I am a chemist by training, and so my first thought was of carbon rings. But what might that signify?
The picture is annotated in pencil with what looks like 'Humangerm'. It isn't clear whether this enigmatic scribble is supposed to be a title for the work or a pseudonym for the artist or perhaps both. I was mystified, although my girlfriend perceptively suggested that - this being San Francisco - it might be a reference to AIDS. And indeed, there was another picture in the living room that shamefully I don't seem to have photographed that looked to me like atoms, but which could also look like virus particles.
It certainly has the feeling that it's meant to disquiet. But sharing a bathroom with a painting about AIDS is maybe a bit *too* disquieting.

It Was The First Time That We Met..

Barcelona!

This has been the first entry for several months. Sadly, I appear to have spent my most recent travels in hotels with relatively tasteful decor. But returning to Barcelona this spring, a city that has already given us one blog entry, I have been overwhelmed with an embarrassment of riches once more, as the Catalan joie de vivre appears to lead hoteliers into enthusiastic bulk purchases of questionable value.
This is a nice, 5 star place, not far from the Ramblas, and apart from one rather bold abstract above the bed that's just you know, fine and all, every frame on the wall holds a corker.

My favourite has to be this one, from the bathroom:

Ink and watercolour on paper, 40x60cm

What are these? Towel rails? Trumpets? Axles? All we know is that it is only number 69 of 70 similar works that 'Ruester' appears to have drawn in 1991. The watercolour has been applied in a brown wash to give the paper the appearance of old parchment, as though this was a sketch dashed off by Leonardo for some astonishing device that was centuries ahead of its time. It taunts us with its enigmatic lack of form.

No such lack of form for our second contender;

Ink on paper. 30x50cm

Apologies if this is a bit blurred - the light isn't very good in the corridor. Here a woman in flowing robes peeps coyly from behind a fan, as we survey the offering in the bowl in front of us. Is she a Flamenca? The robe looks more toga-like than Andalucian. Is she concerned? She might well be - she appears to have given us three anchovies in a glass bowl, the whole picture is tilted at a Hitchcockian angle, and in the background a terrible storm appears to be raging, and a fish is flying - or swimming - past. These are all ground for concern, I would argue.
This one is, the signature tells us, no 11/30 in a series by E. Albardane, '91.  I think I'm beginning to detect when my room was furnished...


And then next to it there's this:

Paint on paper, 20x20cm

Is it me, or does that look like a crime scene? A series of bloody fingerprints left on the wall. The artist - the signature is indecipherable - has painted the central off-white area as a little miniature canvas in the centre of a large sheet of paper. This is number 77/99 in the CSI: Barcelona series.

The last one is not, strictly, hotel room art. Actually it's from one of the public areas downstairs. But I loved it so much I had to include it. Voila:

Poster paint on paper.

I didn't get a very good look at this one, but it's obviously a landscape - a tree to the left, a building against a hillside to the right, a country road, perhaps, in the foreground. For a moment I took it for Japanese-style calligraphy, but actually it's just painted in a very... shall we be charitable and say 'naive' fashion.

So once more then, let us say Viva Barcelona!

Pot Luck

Unsigned. Painted terracotta.



Another objet trouvee, this time a piece of pot glued to a cardboard backing sheet and framed. This comes from a hotel in Tucson, Arizona, and is presumably meant to evoke some kind of Native American vibe, patterns as old as time and all that. Perhaps it's meant to look as though it was just stumbled across in the desert, almost an archaeological specimen, a broken remnant of a broken people, poignant and mysterious. Except of course that it's clearly brand new and never used - it was obviously specifically made to be broken and framed. To the artist's credit, it does look as though the pot has been genuinely handcrafted, though probably by some purple-haired hippie chick in a downtown studio, and not a wizened old Apache with a hand-turned potter's wheel. It's a $5 pot bought from a craft store that someone has smashed and framed a piece of, and then presumably charged Marriott $100 for it. Excellent work, amgio!

The cloth with a thousand uses

This one isn't strictly from a hotel room, but since this blog documents bad art I encounter on business trips I've stretched the definition a bit and included it anyway. In fact it's from the BA lounge at Chicago O'Hare's 5th terminal.

Now, is it just me, or has someone framed and mounted a J-Cloth and hung it on a wall?

Excitingly, this one has pencil notes at the bottom indicating that it is no. 29/60 in a limited series. There was another one a yard or so away - it was a blue J-Cloth. Congratulations to 'R. Imodel', then, for a Duchampian feat of dadaism, like the urinal placed in an art gallery, of taking an everyday found (or indeed in this case presumably *bought*) object, and turning it into 'art'.

California Dreamin'

To Long Beach, the port of Los Angeles. LaLa Land is not renowned for its restraint in matters of taste, so I had high hopes of finding something noteworthy here, and I was not disappointed. Here there is a triple whammy in what the receptionist assured me was a *very* recently refurbished room (and I could still smell the paint when I first arrived, before I was able to air the room a bit). This leads me to conclude that I may well have been the first guest to gaze upon this amazing tryptich.

First the art above the desk;

(Emulsion on natural wood, unsigned)

Pretty harmless geometric abstracts, I guess, although not something I'd share house space with. But Long Beach is a port, don't you see - you can see the RMS Queen Mary at her berth from the window of this room, so the designer felt the need to put in a maritime touch, which may explain this:

(Print on wallpaper)

A strange snakelike musing on fishing nets and rope which dominates the bathroom. And it probably also explains the fact that this six foot edifice has been erected over the bed:

(Print on canvas, unsigned)

I like the way that the blue/grey colour scheme is repeated from the bathroom, but a six foot print of stacked ISO containers? I'm not sure who thought that was a good idea. Subliminally it is reminding us that standardisation has robbed our world of its individuality in the name of efficiency, and nowhere is that more true than in the world of hotels. And as hotels, so the world - we are now all just interchangeable shipping containers full of iPhones and sweatshop fabrics. Pleasant dreams, dudes.