The love suffices your girlfriend?

Various busts of some Greek or Roman dudes on the stair up to the impressionists room in the National Gallery of Scotland. I sometimes take a wee tour down there to see some culchah, this time to have a squizz at the Turner watercolours. What I can never quite understand is why they put these special exhibitions in the daft we walled off area down in the Scottish Collection. It's like the smoking section of an airport down there. Probably because it's the only space available, but odd considering that half the visitors to the Gallery were herded into this small, dark space.

Was sad to see that Van de Velde the Elder' s black and white painting of ships at sea has been moved. There's something about it that appeals to me, but not the curotors it would seem.

The highlight for me was Ken Currie's Three Oncologists which I had never seen before up close. It really is amazingly powerful, and cannot be appreciated in reproduction. I urge you to see it, if you haven't already. It is part of the National Gallery's Portrait of the Nation exhibition that runs until September 2011.

And now to busts of another kind...

The title of this entry refers not to the creativity of the nation's artists, but to the creativity of anonymous, hard working legions of spam emailers the world over. An email came into my inbox today with a rather fetching and artistic nude portrait of a young woman in black and white, taken from behind. Alongside the inviting glance of this buxom beauty were the achingly tender lines, a haiku for the modern age:

The love suffices your girlfriend?
Make happy the girlfriend! Be always at height! Charge by sexual energy!
Happy New Year! Become is more self-assured.

Dixie Blackburn, we shall always remember you.