Art Appreciation – August/September 2024

For the August meeting, members were invited to select a work of art on the theme of ‘Dreams’ or ‘Fantasies’.  This topic produced some fascinating and often unfamiliar choices alongside some favourite surrealist artists such as Magritte and Dali.

Fuseli’s ‘The Nightmare’ captured the essence of a very bad dream perfectly. As we often find, some members introduce us to less familiar artists.  ‘The Badminton Game‘ by David Ishaw presented a dreamlike image of a game being played in the garden of a country house.  The Australian Arthur Boyd’s ‘Jacob’s Dream’ was an original and unusual interpretation of that Bible story set in a recognisably Australian landscape.  Rousseau’s exotic scenes of jungles and wild animals were less of a nightmare but certainly had all the ingredients of a fantasy.

The idea of a ‘dream’ also encompassed ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ which inspired artists as different from each other as William Blake and Edwin Landseer with their very different visions of fairies.  Shakespeare also appears in ‘The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke’.  This was painted by the remarkable Arthur Dadd who spent much of his life in Bethlehem and Broadmoor hospitals, having been convicted of murdering his father.  This extraordinary painting portrays in minute detail a fascinating array of characters and details from folklore and Shakespeare.

At the next meeting on Tuesday 10th September, there will be a presentation on the Norwegian artist, Edvard Munch.

Lynne Vick, Convenor