Art for Art's Sake

In the first post on this blog, 'Starting Over', I referred to a painting I'd bought, 'an abstract oil painting from Roxy Cafe across the road from the office'; this is it.

It currently hangs in the Roxy Cafe which is run by a lovely couple from I think Vietnam, or Cambodia, or Basingstoke or somewhere. The food is wonderful and they know all the office staff's preferences and pander to us like we're Royalty; we use it as our 'offsite' meeting room because our own offices are totally inadequate.

First, a disclaimer; it was difficult taking the pictuire because the cafe is quite dark and the internal lights, combined with the camera default flash produced an extreme contrast between the lighter top of the picture (highlighted by the ceiling lights) and the dark bottom of the pictire (no lights on the floor), which confused the camera. Eventually we took the picture off the wall, stood it on the table which held the water jugs and leaned it against the wall. This was a mistake as the resultant angle produced distortions of the verticals and horizontals or maybe the wide-angle of the camera was set wrongly. I've tried to rectify this in photoshop but it's nowhere near perfect.

The picture is in oils on stretched canvas so can be hung without framing. It intrigues me. I see the 'subject' (it's abstract!) as two different possibilities, 1) a sunset/sunrise over a distant island across a sun-drenched ocean and 2) an 18th Century battleship (think Pirates of the Caribbean) on fire in the midst of a fire-saturated sea-battle.

I like it, as I said, it intrigues me. It will have a special place in whatever we decide to call The House!