Dali House

“Kermit and His Screwdriver” and “Shiny Chicken” are two of Karl Persson’s least appalling paintings. If you’re in a Halloweenish mood, there’s far worse at his website, his new Facebook page and at the surrealism-lives fantasy-art website BeInArt, where Persson has a gallery.

But don’t visit while you’re eating.

As if left speechless, none of these online sources has much to say about him other than this rather uninspired soundbite from Karl himself:

“My intellect doesn’t come into play when I am channelling something subconsciously. There is plenty of time for interpretation after a painting is finished.

“Whenever I look at my finished paintings it is like analysing a dream — deciphering my personal symbolic language. Although there is obviously some calculated thought behind things like compositional aesthetics, I still try to keep these decisions relatively instinctive.

“I find this approach far more fulfilling than when I have injected some preconceived concept into an image, which has often consequently become either stale or too obvious.”

I’ve never read the scholarly treatises on Grandma Moses, but I’d be surprised if any of them said something that wasn’t obvious. I expect they say, “Captured the American spirit because …”, “Became tremendously popular because …”. That sort of thing.

The story of Anna Mary Robertson Moses is extraordinary. She raised her kids, buried her husband and had a full, long life before arthritis shifted her from embroidering local rustic scenes to painting them.

She was the county-fair biddy from upstate New York who Edward R Murrow interviewed on TV and to whom President Truman handed an award. Her “Fourth of July”, done for Eisenhower, still hangs in the White House.

She defined “folk art” for most Americans long before they recognised the significance of the blues music in their midst.

An art collector spotted her paintings in the window of a drugstore in the middle of nowhere in 1938, and then an art dealer put them on show in the Big Apple. Within a few years Grandma Moses was having exhibitions across Europe and in Japan, people snapping up her originals as fast as Hallmark could get them out as greeting cards.

Maintaining the supply didn’t seem to be a problem: Moses painted 3,600 pictures in three decades.

The 1956 work at the top of this post and in detail below, “July”, was being auctioned in New York last year for around $50,000, which was nothing compared to the $1.2 million earned in 2006 by “Sugaring Off”, a piece done in 1943.

Grandma Moses’ original asking price in the 1940s was “$2 for a small painting and $3 for a large”. See the rest.

There’s an amusing video on YouTube showing how Disney has recycled all of the original drawings for its animated films, so that characters’ movements and facial expressions in more recent cartoons exactly match those of the classics.

Evidently Disney’s artists can’t be arsed to draw stuff from scratch.

But who would have thought the American Meat Council would make use of an old Nazi youth-recruitment poster?

“View with Ruins, a Pyramid and Peasants” probably wasn’t the original title of this 18th-century landscape attributed only to the Venetian School. It sounds like something a curator or dealer would come up with to make do in the absence of the actual title, possibly even Sotheby’s when it put this work on sale a year ago for around €10,000.

But it looks to me like the unknown artist was saying something about religion, or at least faith in the old ways.

A pyramid in Italy isn’t so far-fetched, I learn. The roaming legions of the Roman Empire, having subdued Egypt, started building them everywhere, as if to say, “This shape and everything it symbolises belong to us now. May the gods bless this shape and all who invest their imagination in her.”

You need considerable imagination to visualise Giza-style pyramids in the countryside outside Milan, but three adjacent hills there stirred up the New Age crowd in 2003 when someone said they aligned perfectly with the constellation Orion.

CrystalLinks.com was among the websites that quoted one “Marco V” as saying the three pyramids in the town of Montevecchia had just been “discovered thanks to satellite and aerial imagery”. (The pictures online prove nothing.)

“They are stone buildings, as recent excavations have proved,” Marco claimed. “However, they are now completely covered by ground and vegetation, so that they now look like hills … Their age is still undefined although they are surely older than 3,000 years.”

Yes, they would be if they’re only hills of rock and dirt that were terraced for cultivation.

“They are the first pyramids ever discovered in Italy,” Marco added, but even Crystal Links knows about Rome’s Pyramid of Cestius, a 27-metre-tall brick-and-marble structure built about 12 BC to hold the mortal remains of local religious leader Caius Cestius.

The Montevecchia pyramids are just hills, and the tomb of Cestius is very well preserved, although it had become so overgrown with vegetation by the Middle Ages that people decided it must be where Remus or Romulus lay buried. More disillusion.

Regardless, I could find nothing online about the Italian pyramid set between Christian churches.

But, getting past the complaint that this structure and the one in Rome follow a much sharper angle than the most famous ones in Giza (since the Egyptians built steeper pyramids during the Ptolemaic dynasty just prior to the Roman conquest), it’s easy to see them sprouting up around Europe two millennia ago.

Purportedly they were erected by Roman legionaires who were devotees of an Egyptian cult or, if you abide by the speculation of the high-profile geologist Robert Schoch, the handiwork an early civilisation that “travelled around the world building pyramids”, or at least a cultural concept that was knowingly shared.

“The Way of Sleeping” by Lampu Kansanoh is rather a standout among the Thai works on the Christie’s auction block in Hong Kong on May 24. The sale of “Southeast Asian Modern and Contemporary Art” is dominated by Filipinos and Malaysians, but has a sound sampling from the Land of Smiles too.

Lampu’s 2006 oil on canvas is expected to fetch upwards of HK$45,000, which is marked down to $6,000 when translated into American.

I also like Yuree Kensaku’s “Truck Driver’s Sweetheart”, same year, same medium (with metal added), roughly the same price, but lacking the same restraint of Lampu’s picture, which I consider a big plus when you’re throwing your psyche around.

This is Prasong Luemuang’s untitled gouache and paper collage, which costs a little more, perhaps HK$80,000 (US$10,000).

Moungthai Busamaro’s “Woman under the Pink Tree” from 2002 is available for considerably less, maybe around US$2,000, but it’s an engaging streetscape that would be fun on any wall. See the rest.