THE EYES FOLLOW YOU ROUND THE ROOM

I've never been a great one for mooching around museums, and the first painting that really grabbed me was Waterhouse's "The Lady of Shalott" when I was 14 - mainly because I wanted to look like her.



I then did a module on German Expressionist Art (no, really!) at university and was exposed to the work of die Bruecke and Blaue Reiter movements. I was mistakenly perceived as having a good eye for Expressionism when, during a particularly long-winded analysis of Franz Marc's "Mandrill" I muttered sotto voce (but obviously not sotto enough) "It's a big con isn't it?". The elderly lecturer was a bit deaf, and homed in on me. "What's that, Miss Harridan? A bit cold, you say? Yes, yes, I can see what you mean."

Franz Marc's cold mandrill

I was not remotely tuned in to non-figurative imagery. At the time my idea of art was an Athena poster stuck to my wall with Blu-Tac. I think I had the Vietnamese girl one. Although I might have got it from Boots Art Department. I do recall I was rather fond of Salvador Dali and Roger Dean's album covers.



Then I moved to Paris where one cannot avoid coming into contact with real art. I was a great fan of the old Jeu de Paume museum which had a reasonable-sized collection of turn of the century masterpieces over two floors, just enough, which was later absorbed by the huge Musee d'Orsay, which to this day I have never been inside, never having two hours to spare to stand in a queue. Manet, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Renoir, Gauguin, Cezanne, Delaunay, Picasso, Degas, Pissarro ..... I used to fantasize about being a midinette in turn-of-the-century Montmartre, drinking absinthe and dancing the can-can.


As I grew older my taste matured, but I still did not 'get' abstract art. I collected pictures by friends, and landscapes of places that meant something. I came to appreciate photography, film posters and vintage advertising. But Tate Modern left me cold. My father dabbled in the abstract art world for a short while, acquiring a work which turned out to have been robbed from a bonded warehouse in Germany, so his career as a patron of the arts was short-lived and he was lucky to get off with a caution. Hockney was henceforth a dirty word in the Harridan household.

Marrying Harold didn't help my appreciation of painting - he was a total Philistine when it came to art. I thought he'd had an epiphany the time I took him to the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow and left him in front of one of the only three Leonardo da Vinci paintings on public display, to find him still staring at it ten minutes later. I tentatively tried to find out what he was thinking.

"Umm, do you like it?" I ventured, hesitantly.

"Nope." he replied. "But the alarm system is bloody first rate."

Can you spot the sensors?

In the lobby of FOBiAs* European headquarters there is an exhibition of artwork for sale changed on a monthly basis, and, after walking past one particular piece several times, I stopped and looked at it properly. I thought it had enormous energy and movement. I always thought that was the sort of thing art critics said when they didn't understand a painting, but I could see straight away what it was, which was confirmed when I checked the title of the work. It's by a Dutch artist called Irene Van den Bos. Since the economic crisis my savings seem to have gone on strike and are earning diddly squat. So I decided to sink some money into something that might increase in value, as well as bringing me great pleasure and bought it as a birthday present to myself.

Have you guessed what it is yet?

*Federation of Brass Instrument Aficionados