Are you utterly bewildered?

"150 Years Ago Today"
Original watercolour
by
Glenn Marshall

http://glenn-marshall.artistwebsites.com/featured/150-years-ago-today-glenn-marshall.html

Earlier this week I was given a book entitled "The 20th Century Art Book". It made depressing reading for me. Art has certainly changed in the last one hundred years or so - we have had 'post-impressionism','expressionism','post-expressionism','cubism','post-cubism','surrealism' and every other 'ism' you can think of.
Maybe it's because I'm a boring old reactionary but my favourite'art' comes from the 19th Century! There was a marvellous flowering of talent especially towards the end of that century. Sadly their efforts are now mostly derided and ridiculed, their craftsmanship mocked as too rigid, and their descriptive skill dismissed as irrelevant.
My painting above is a watercolour painting trying to emulate the effects that John Atkinson Grimshaw achieved with his oil paintings. Grimshaw is a case in point - dismissed as a charlatan and a trickster by the 'critics' soon after his death, his work and his reputation faded from public interest. However there has been a great revival of interest in Grimshaw and his paintings are now selling round about the three to four hundred thousand mark...maybe there is hope for us after all!
I came across this quote from Al Capp:
"Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered."
I'll leave it up to  you whether you agree or not - but I know what I think.