Icarus allsorts

This is called "Icarus", by Andrea Wordsworth. The original is more like 4ft wide but this was scanned out of the catalogue of the Wylye Valley Arts Trail, so it's probably in massive infringement of copyright but hey, people, I'm trying to advertise you.

And anyway, a quick look at her own web page tells me it's there too.

The Arts Trail consists of artists in all kinds of media opening up their homes and galleries in and around Wiltshire's Wylye (pronounced Wiley) Valley so the great British public can turn up and gawp. As part of our now substantially revised sailing holiday we did just that, looking at paintings and jewellery and sculptures and strange fabric thingies and hats. I feel a kind of duty to appreciate the work of anyone who genuinely labours in the creative arts, whatever their medium, but some are easier than others, and Andrea Wordsworth's pictures are the ones that stayed with me the longest. She did a whole series based on the Greek islands, and the Mediterranean heat and the light beat right back at you out of the canvas.

But it's Icarus that takes the prize. I generally find it very hard to believe that any human figure in a painting is meant to be moving - maybe it's just the way my brain is wired - but here I really could believe she had got a boy in red Bermudas to jump into the sea, and then shouted "hold it!" while he was in mid-air so she could do a sketch.

And that, too, is the way my brain is wired.

For some reason I was always the one made to sign the visitors book, and you can trace our steps around the valley by spotting the decreasing inspiration in each book's Comments section. But it meant I got to read the comments of others, of which my favourite was "Midnight Horizon would look better the other way up."

Well, that's modern art, and everyone's a critic.