Original artwork description:

Inspiration for some paintings comes from many different sources: a scene, a photograph, a feeling, a message, a massive ingestion of hard drugs.

Take Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s series of works known as The Scream (aka The Cry, The Shriek). Munch’s version of how it came about was that the was out walking with friends near a fjord one evening when the clouds turned blood red and he sensed 'a scream passing through nature’. Fair enough you might think; a bit weird, but I can live with that. However, people who know nothing about it, but who make a decent living speculating over such things, suggest alternative inspirations which involve: the Krakatoa volcanic eruption (10 years earlier); a slaughterhouse; a nearby lunatic asylum in which Munch’s sister was incarcerated; a Peruvian mummy, also much favoured by Munch’s friend and fellow weirdo Paul Gaugin.

So far, so confusing.

The point is do the origins of paintings matter, as long as the end result looks good on the wall above your sofa? Some artists are on a production line churning out derivative stuff like the Chorleywood Bread Process; there can be no back story at all behind much of what they do. Does anyone care?

This painting, ‘White Orchids and Complicated Window Reflection’, would probably never had seen the light of day if it weren’t for a minor motoring accident in the Dutch city of Groningen.

So, I had lent my car to my daughter, who works in that fine Dutch city, and she parked it next to a guy who was considerably inexpert at parking, but who also had a social conscience. Poor Parker smacked into our car while parking next to us, inflicting about 600 euros worth of damage. My daughter was not present at the time and PP could easily have driven off and parked somewhere else: we would never have known who had done the damage. However, PP left a note on the windscreen with contact details and the name of his insurance company. Nice gesture!

We claimed off his insurance, of course, and our insurance company gave us the name of a designated body shop, on bleak industrial estate near where we live just outside Amsterdam, where the repairs had to be done. After two days the body shop called to say the car was ready and when I picked it up I was just on my way out of the office when the receptionist called me back and handed me this white orchid. ‘We wanted to thank you for choosing us to do the work.’ OK. No problem.

Now I’m no horticulturalist but I can appreciate a beautiful flower and this orchid has been in our house now for over a year. It has two mains stems, one of which fizzled out after six months, leaving this one to take over. We give it as slurp of water every couple of weeks but that’s about it in terms of upkeep, and for that miniscule effort we have had the pleasure of this plant in our house brightening up our little lives.

So, this painting almost certainly would not have come into existence if PP hadn’t scraped our car in Groningen and the body shop where we were forced to take our car did not happen to be in the middle of Free-Orchids-With-Every-Repair Month. Does this make the painting any better or worse than The Scream, whose origin is more prosaic? Clearly worse. A lot worse. Catastrophically worse. One version of The Scream sold for $120m in 2012. I think it would be right to assume that this picture may not be quite so financially lucrative.

Back story doesn’t matter. The Chorleywood Bread Process is a highly successful formula. What matters is what looks good on the wall above your sofa. Never forget this.

You don’t have to buy this painting because some jerk in Groningen can’t park.

Materials used:

Acrylics

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