Saturday, December 14, 2013

One way to get the best art from your pupils

How often have we heard the expression that some curator/collector/dealer has got a "great eye”? There've even cartoons about it with eyes on legs strutting around galleries looking at paintings. The NZ artist Boyd Webb as an art student once mocked the idea by arranging for a blind person to slowly go from painting to painting in a large group show, carefully considering each one. Only some people found this to be funny.

All this by way of stating that even in these non-connoisseurial days we can definitely say that Leandro Granato has a great eye. He may not make great paintings but it is a great thing that he does with that great eye. You can watch Leandro’s bizarre do-not-try-this-at-home painting technique here. As Leandro told an interviewer, ‘Ever since I was a kid I knew I had a special connection between my eye and my nose.’ And between his eye and the canvas too, if you ask us.