By the Look of Things

Résumé du livre

For fifty years, the West Country artist Robert Organ 'has been painting his life'. Some of his canvasses depict the West-country valley where he lives; others find him revisiting his childhood Weston-super-Mare, or the coast of Dorset, where he charts the Sun's path over the sea in an attempt to capture the effect of light on water. Trips to France have led to large landscape paintings and 'conversation pieces' - models strutting on the beach at Cannes, accordionists playing in dance-halls. A residency at Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum produced a set of paintings of people and artefacts in the museum; another series focussed on birds and animals in a wildlife park. The subject of old age - a theme rarely explored in painting - found Organ drawing and painting the residents of a local nursing home, and his unflinching portrayals of the aged, rich in color, are humane yet movingly optimistic. With these 'genre' scenes go numerous portraits of friends and family, including David Attenborough, Charles Dance, Michael Gough, Seamus Heaney and Nevil Marriner. Another abiding theme is the still life: large table-tops spread with books and objects collected over the years.