h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

That's a very good one too Anhaga. I'm not sure if it is the one I'm remembering - the woman looks exactly right, but in my memory the viewpoint was further back, higher up and looking from the other angle, and the couple were sitting at a table on the pavement in front of a cafe. I think it had been reproduced on the cover of a book, and it had a greener tinge than the Degas. But it's strange how your memory can 'move you around' inside the space of a 2-dimensional painting, as though it were really 3D. It probably was this one I think, but my memory of it was quite different.

This is the Munch one I mentioned: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/munch/puberty.jpg.html It's not obviously that similar, but something about the looming shadow brought it to mind. A bit scarier.

Funny you should mention it: before I googled up the Degas, I had it pictured in my head as being from a different viewpoint as well. But the Degas *is* the painting I was thinking of.


I like Munch.

Yes, I like Munch. I do think both Degas and Manet were probably better painters though. That Manet painting you linked to is really superb - particularly when you bear in mind he painted it half-way through the C19th. In the Degas, the table-tops seem to be hovering - I can't make out any legs or support. They're almost like an abstract motif in the painting. And there's something which may be a newspaper in the lower left corner, hovering as well. These seem accentuated by the otherwise very convincing 3-dimensionality of the subject/object's positioning and solidity in space. The two faces, and the forms of the two characters are brilliantly done. Degas's better known for his ballerina paintings, and I think the stillness and introspection of this really shows how good he was. I think there's a triangular relationship between the blank vacuum of the woman's eyes, the man's eyes, and the blank glass of absinthe in front of the woman that draws you in to the interior world of the characters. (Manet's glass and Degas's seem quite similar as well).

The Manet was done early in his career, as well. I quite like it. Particularly the hat.

I have a fondness for Impressionism. As one who daubs paint, it is perhaps partly laziness: I lose patience with 'finish'.

It's a top hat.

But the jaggedness, and irregularity of the bottle are probably not what anyone would associate with 'impressionism'.

And the sublety and tenderness of the face, in the middle of that shifting darkness and un-literal spatial depiction is so ahead of his time, it's really quite amazing. It's quite hard to look at it and understand how Manet could be so much more conceptually advanced than anyone else of his time.

I've not smeared paint around for quite a while, myself. I think it's a great thing to do. I should get back in to it. Isn't there a well-known quote about poetry, to the effect that a poem is never finished, just abandoned. I think that's true of painting too. A painting's never finished, just brought to a state where you think that anything more you do to it might make it less than it is.

I don't know whether there is such a quote -- but there should be.



I will become more incoherent now: the absinthe has returned.

I have still to experience the horizons of absinthe. Today, the Shiraz is finished, and I may amuse myself with a glass of brandy. No famous paintings about either of those, that I'm aware of.

Best wishes for now.