A Thing of Beauty

Week 10 theme for Colour Me Positive was: beauty, and the art challenge to use flowers. I started with a painted background (using flowery colours) and used flower stencils from Stencilgirl Products. The main one was the Deconstructed Floral Bouquet designed by Traci Bautista. I also used the Doodle It Daisy. They were sprayed on using Liquitex spray paints.

I had found a quotation in my stash which reads: "Harmony and beauty are fundamental. But colour and bright floral patterns are important, too" and added that to the spread.

The medieval looking woman came from a newspaper article where it was mentioned that someone called Shaun Greenhalgh has painted La Bella Principessa as she is known in 1978,  and that it is thus not a Leonardo Da Vinci  and dating from the 15th Century as had been believed. He claims she is based on a bossy girl who worked at a Bolton Co-op supermarket. You can't help but laugh! Shaun Greenhalgh  (member of what became known as The Garden Shed Gang) is a prolific art forger so it's quite likely his story is true. Of course this is not a laughing matter for the people who were fooled into spending lots of money buying his "art", but I have to say it's amazingly well done. It makes me wonder why he dedicated his life to making forgeries instead of concentrating on his own art. Shaun has written a book about his forgeries with no less a person than Waldemar Januscszak as his co-author, called: A Forger's Tale and I was tempted to read it but sadly it is currently unavailable on Amazon. You have to wonder why!

The centres of the flowers were torn from one of my own flower photographs, glued on and outlined with watersoluble oil pastels.

The tulip postage stamps were a logical addition as that corner at bottom left looked quite empty and it also means there is now a vaguely diagonal line running through the spread which satisfies my eye.

I kept thinking about another quotation about beauty while making these pages and it is this one by Keats: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever; it's loveliness increases, it will never pass into nothingness". That's true about art but I feel it's also true about this forgery. I wrote it down alongside her head.

Can't help but wonder though if the checkout girl from Bolton knows that her beauty has been captured in this way  together with her bossiness.