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Services. 2026-08-21 09:15:35 - Paul D. Foy - Artwork The acquisition of this artwork, this painting, is shrouded in mystery. I think it was bought in a back street of Leeds, in a terraced house-like property, whilst others, including my mother, think it was bought in the market place at Cambridge. In any event it was bought when I was around 20 years old and I do actually remember fragments of conversation I had with the vendor. I was asking, "Is this worth a lot?" and he answered in phrases such as, "No son. Let me be straight with you. This was painted en masse as a series of paintings. It's not very valuable and it's not a grand prize. " I think it was probably painted by one artist, painting multiple paintings of the same scene or perhaps he had an assistant or a small team of people painting the same scene many times. In any case it is mass produced in some sense. At least that was what my thinking is but it is without doubt an original piece of art and indeed it is signed. It is an oil painting. It's clearly by hand so it is certainly original. Now what is the remarkable thing about this is that I can't quite remember the price I paid for it but it's not very great at all because I wouldn't pay much for something like this just to sit about or hang on the wall. I think I paid about £5 for it, which in today's money is about £20. Now it's quite remarkable because you can look at instances of this type of painting, this type of scene, this portraiture, like these original works. They're available, yes, they are available in art dealers and art galleries on the internet and they might cost £1,600. Now I had a putative suggestion for an idea of mass-producing artwork from a painting-by-numbers depiction, which various companies do. My sort of thinking of the pricing there was £400 or so I don't quite know what was going on with the artists then, how they were funding their lives in any way. It's quite interesting. 2026-09-05 11:39:37 - Paul D. Foy - I'd like to present you with some modern art that I did. It is a photograph of a house that has been reduced to 30 colours and then the regions of colour have been amalgamated and the most common colour is selected to fill that region. This has been done in a rectilinear manner. What I then did was produce boundaries around each region in black so that each separate region is delineated by a boundary. This was all done using the computer, algorithms, and C# programming and I did this myself. I didn't use AI to generate the code in any sense although I did use AI occasionally to give me some ideas about how to go about doing this. The point of this comment is to make some observations on education because I think there are many opportunities opening up in education and teaching different types of things and things which are not conventionally taught alongside courses. For example, one of the many criticisms (and there are certainly many and it's generally by men, to tell the truth) of arts courses is that they don't equip people for the real world. They just equip them for doing what they want or like to do, they haven't got any relevant skills, they're difficult to employ, and they're a burden on society, etc. , etc. , etc. Well how about this? If you're an artist and you're studying art things at art school, why don't you invest some time in these things? Why aren't you taught some programming techniques, how to programme in C#, some basic mathematics, and some basic skills to produce these digital images and to help create your artwork? Even use the digital skills and the programming skills to have ideas for artwork to do and that kind of thing. That broadens you out. It complements the need to study the basic subjects (mathematics, English, computer science, that kind of thing) at school and gives this school education a raison d'être for something that you personally (and by extension society) might enjoy doing more. If your artistic career doesn't take off, you don't become a Van Gogh or something, you can fall back on working in conventional industries where your computer skills, even your programming skills, your knowledge of AI, ChatGPT, etc. , and how to drive these tools will prove very useful. That is my thinking on that one.  2026-08-21 10:20:05 - Paul D. Foy - I think the world of art and this price appreciation is mirroring quite well what is going on. I once heard it said that you can spot when there's a financial bubble, when financial excesses are occurring, in that the price of grand masters at auction reaches exorbitant levels. Well I think at a more localised level and a lesser level we can see this here. Prices of art are appreciating. Why is this? Labour is being valued more. Labour is becoming more expensive. People are asking more for their labour. The artist has got to charge what he can to live in the world around him. Inflation is caused by people asking for too much for their labour, pricing their labour too high. There are also other phenomena. Perhaps people are getting lazier. They're doing less work. They're relying on other people, other machines to do their work for them. For example they may rely on expensive equipment and the producers of this expensive equipment have got to be educated. They've got to spend time at university. They've got to spend time learning so there is a cost involved in that. They may feel they have to value themselves more because they're educated and they know things that other people can't do. Their skills are rarer, etc. Phenomena are going on all the time. Perhaps people are getting lazier and they're asking for more money. They're valuing their labour more. This puts up the price of things. It's not a good thing. It's not a good thing because it makes it difficult for other people perhaps. It's a vicious feedback loop. Organisations like the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve are very guarded about encouraging inflation. They know the dangers of this. It is an instability in society. It is people getting out of control. So if people can't control themselves, they try to use fiducial techniques, their interest rates, etc. , to encourage them to behave more responsibly. Money is labour and the value of labour is the price. 2026-08-21 09:17:13 - Paul D. Foy - Here is the painting.  Post a comment: |