The Bartender Never Gets Killed

One of the (few) advantages about being an autodidact in the art world, is that you come across people already established and you’ve never heard of them! Always a nice surprise. One such is Calum Colvin

Calum projects paintings onto room surfaces to create a still/life montage.

In one project he reinterpreted the work of the masters in this way.

I must admit to being totally overwhelmed by these - definitely in the ‘I would buy it if I could afford it’ category.

From the website

Colvin’s triumph is to have reclaimed these apparently dusty objects for the late 20th century. His apparent blasphemy is their resurrection as he opens our eyes to the universality of the old masters. It is not by chance that his figures twine around the very fabric of his room-sets. The implication is that their personae are locked within the human psyche, as deeply embedded in the spirit of the post-modern world as the geegaws with which they share house room. Thus Venus is painted across the drawers and mirror of a dressing table and Diana the huntress becomes a languid housewife, her attendant nymphs like so many bimbos at some weird, nude, suburban coffee morning. Her bower is hung, not with swags of velveteen but with the trappings of our own baroque age - Madonna and Club 18-30 T-shirts. Actaeon shields himself, not from the stag’s skull, symbol of his ultimate transformation and death, but from its post-modern equivalent. His punishment for the crime of pornographic voyeurism is to be fettered to an ironing board. It’s a cunning piece of post-feminist visual rhetoric.