Watering

A day of downpours, which saves me the job of watering the baskets and planters. I've spent most of my day so far at the computer, on various tasks, and will shortly move to the kitchen to prepare a special dinner.

A first listen to an album by Bert Jansch - Edge of a Dream (2002). My favourite track was All This Remains, on which the singer is Hope Sandoval.

I've had a look at two French Post-war artists, with similar names but different styles. Jean Dubuffet was fascinated by the work of children, amateur painters, psychotics and other "marginal" people. He called their work Art Brut (or "rough art.") His own style was rather more sophisticated although with naive elements. For example, in Jazz Band (Dirty Style Blues) (1944) he used elongated figures, a simplistic technique, a limited and muddy palette.  The six musicians are all facing the viewer as they might in a child's drawing.

Bernard Buffet spent World War II in Paris in great poverty.  He wrote that "painting exists to bear witness, and nothing that is human can be foreign to it." In The Net (1948) Buffet gave a simple image of a person mending a fishing net a sense of tension and imprisonment, muted and ominous.