Three-Bar Terms

I thought it would be fun to make one of those three-bar "poster books" I was making earlier in the year, using some of my many photographs of those unsettling Mottisfont Abbey herms / terms. Which it was.

Those bizarre "wrapped" images in the centre bar are real, by the way: in recent years they have taken to protecting the statuary from the elements in the winter months, which seems a bit pointless, given the absence of any winter weather to protect them from. But no doubt there's a National Trust policy document somewhere requiring this to be done. The NT: saving battered garden ornaments for the nation.

Talking of amateurishly-restored antiquities, though, have you seen this? Heh... Once I'd stopped laughing, though, it struck me that the most disturbing aspect of this fiasco was that that either of those ham-fisted renderings would have been of a suitable standard of, um, skill to have been accepted into most of the big open art shows I've seen in recent times, from the Royal Academy down. Seriously. One of these days, someone whose grasp of what matters in Art is greater than mine must explain to me why the work of, say, Rose Wylie is worthy of our attention. Sadly, such people almost certainly do not read this blog.