Zero Degrees of Empathy
By Simon Baron-Cohen

Simon Baron-Cohen is a Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. His main areas of research are autism and empathy. I have just finished reading his new book Zero Degrees of Empathy.

I read a good book a year or so ago by the author (and another Professor) Adrian Raine, a book called The Anatomy of Violence, and I saw Raine's name come up here. Raine looks at the causes of criminality, and particularly violent crime: how much is genetic, how much environmental. Baron-Cohen's new book is a look at the causes of cruelty, and the nature of evil. Rightly, he sees the word "evil" as unscientific and wants to bring some scientific rigour to it. He posits that cruelty and violence is related to how much empathy you have (a measurable empathy quotient). He outlines this theory and looks for causes.

Baron-Cohen takes some time to investigate some case studies and looks at the background of people with some severe behavioural or personality disorders. The final analysis finds multiple reasons some people end up with problems and, as one would expect, there is a partly environmental as well as partly genetic cause. The following passage is one that struck me as I leafed through the book in the bookshop, and is partly responsible for the purchase. On bringing up children :

What the caregiver gives his or her child in those first few critical years is like an internal pot of gold. The idea - which builds on Freud's insight - is that what a parent can give his or her child by way of filling the child up with positive emotions is a gift more precious than anything material. That internal pot of gold is something the child can carry throughout their life, even if they become a penniless refugee or are beset by other challenges. The internal pot of gold is what gives the individual the strength to deal with challenges, the ability to bounce back from setbacks, and the ability to show affection and enjoy intimacy with others, in other relationships. It overlaps with what London child psychiatrist Michael Rutter refers to as "resilience".

This "internal pot of gold" is a very powerful description of what good parenting can do for a child. This is a brief but worthwhie read.

This is a small painting I did at the weekend :

The above is a copy of a painting by Christopher Miers, Late Afternoon Light, Venice and is a very impressionistic piece of work. His paintings (see his web site) are often quite simple but very effective. I like them.

I saw Miers' painting at the RBA show this year and I liked its simplicity immediately. In fact, I thought it was simple enough for me to have a go myself. I only spent about 40 minutes on it, painting it in one go.

The original :

Waldemar Januszczak is an acquired taste as a broadcaster, there's something of the wideboy about him: the brash Londoner. However, stick with him because he's created two very good BBC Television series about art.

Firstly, his series on the Impressionists showed more of the art and the background than I've seen before. I learned new and interesting details that made things fresh again, including learning of an artist I hadn't heard of before: Gustave Caillebotte. More recently, his Renaissance Unchained series has covered the expected (Michelangelo, Leonardo, Durer) but also the more unexpected, such as St George and the Dragon by Bernt Notke or the Compianto sul Cristo morto by Niccolo dell'Arca.

From the beginning, Januszczak posits that Vasari, author of the famous Lives of the Artists, was less than fair with the Northern masters, precursors of the new artistic rebirth in the 15th Century. Artists like Jan Van Eyck, Hans Memling, Rogier van der Weyden and Hieronymus Bosch. A bit like a football fan, Vasari, from Florence, was "rooting for the home team" a bit perhaps. There is a compelling argument to be made here: Italy did reach the pinnacle of artistic achievement of course, but the Northern Renaissance also happened. Waldemar Januszczak attempts to redress this a little and made four very good programs, well worth catching.

And if anyone is wondering about what they might be missing, not having heard of Niccolo dell'Arca or Bernt Notke, take a look. The Lamentation over the Dead Christ is especially powerful and must contain some of the most powerful and emotionally charged figures I have ever seen. More here.

Niccolò dell'arca, Compianto sul Cristo morto (detail), Terracotta. 1460's. Bologna

St. George and the Dragon, Bernt Notke. Storkyrkan, Stockholm. 1470's.

A new painting.

It did not turn out quite the way I wanted, but I'm fairly happy. I got the colour wrong for the bowls but decided to "fix" it once touch-dry with a glaze. Still not quite right but acceptable. There are other things wrong, but I won't dwell on it. I like the light and the wood texture.

Seen and liked at the Royal Society of British Artists 2016 exhibition at the Mall Galleries.

There were lots of other ones I liked, including all the Nicholas Verrall. One of them :

Bay of St Tropez, by Nicholas Verrall

The Verrall is 61 x 74 cm. And for real simplicity, but very effective, what about this one at 28 x 33mm :

Late Afternoon Light, Venice, by Christopher Miers

See lots of others here.

Walking into the first room of the Botticelli Reimagined exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum and looking around had me slightly worried. Worried that the show was going to be too much pop, fashion or superficial kitsch. I'm just not very enamoured with David LaChapelle's day-glo style or performance artist Orlan.

Then I came face to face with a surprise tucked around the corner : a piece of art that I really loved when I first came across it a year or so ago. This is the Donghi (see below). From here on, things picked up for me. On to room two and a lot of interesting paintings, most from the 19th Century (and many Pre-Raphaelite). Then, room three and we finally come to some real Botticelli work (as well as many "workshop of"). Even Botticelli drawings of Dante, something you can also catch at the Courtauld just now, and something I wrote about recently.

The Donghi painting impressed me a year or so ago when it appeared in a Guardian piece. What a surprise to see it in real life. It still impresses me with its clean lines and colour, although how much influence Venus had on it is probably very debatable. Then again, there were quite a few tenuous links made throughout the exhibition.

On the right: Woman at the Cafe, Antonio Donghi, 1932

Room two had many paintings I liked, including a few Rossetti, Burne-Jones and a large tapestry by William Morris called The Orchard.

On the right: Luna, by Edward Burne-Jones.

Luna is a beautiful and atmospheric painting, one of a series of allegorical female figures Burne-Jones completed in the 1870's. According to a Christies page, this was previously owned by Yves St Laurent (who seems to have had very good taste in art if you glance through the sale catalog).

Below : The Orchard by William Morris and John Henry Dearl. About 1863

The Orchard is a large (wall size) tapestry showing fruit trees ready to harvest and women holding a poem of Morris' own composition. Again, perhaps only peripherally related to Botticelli's Venus, but looking up at this and the others, who cares?

The last room is devoted to work from Botticelli's time, including many from his workshop. Some would have had input from him, but others perhaps not and the quality is variable. There were too many Madonna and Child for instance, and a few were not so good (not true Botticelli, I hasten to add). It does highlight his mastery when we see it though. Unfortunately, no actual Birth of Venus (it never leaves the The Uffizi), but some good pieces.

On the right: Portrait of a Young Man, c.1480-5 by Sandro Botticelli

It's a lovely museum and a really good exhibition. One I'll try to visit again.

On the right is a painting called The Cowgate, by Henry Kondracki.

People familiar with Edinburgh will recognise the location. Kondracki captures the ambience of a cold, snowy dusk very well, especially the tire tracks in the snow and the warm light thrown out by shops and windows. It takes me back to the time I lived up there and I might be hurrying up to the Bridges to catch a bus home (I can see the condensation on the windows and even hear the bus window wipers going). Not so good for cycling though, not just the weather but too many cobbled streets!

This picture won first prize at the Lynn Painter-Stainers Show for 2016.

I was very pleased with the way this came out. It was also the first time I did some glazing. Glazing is using a transparent layer on top of a base colour and it is a way of deepening and enhancing the way the colour appears. I only needed a little for the brownish colour on the sides of the apples but it had to be quite subtle. I waited two weeks to be sure the paint was properly touch dry and took care but I think it worked very well.

A God in Ruins, by Kate Atkinson

A God In Ruins is Kate Atkinson's follow up ("companion") to her highly praised (not least by me) novel Life After Life.

We follow the life of Ursula Todd's much loved brother Teddy through his Second World War experience as a bomber pilot and on to marriage, parenthood and old age. The story is told in a non-sequential way, jumping backwards and forwards through time, visiting various points of the characters' lives. We see through the eyes of Teddy himself, Nancy (his childhood sweetheart and wife), Viola, their daughter, and his grandchildren. There is less "magic" here but this is because so much was sucked out of the world by the second big war (as much a continuation of the first really).

There are many beautiful moments, moving and thoughtful, some very funny but also some darker and more terrifying, as we experience what is was like to pilot a bomber over Nazi occupied Europe. As well as raining a terrible death and destruction over Germany, creating an inferno as the war reached its climax, most of the air crew were very young, and many never came back. Atkinson is very good on the human face to war. But as well as this tragic destruction of human life and European civilisation, the aftermath of the war is a heavy weight on survivors; we see this through the generations.

I like these two books for the evocation of the pre-war world for the Todd's at Fox Corner, their house: comfortable family life, nature, dogs and poetry. A vanished world. And then the attempt to understand how the country turns out once much is swept away by the war. People are not so easily regenerated compared to the physical world. People forget, and want to forget, or perhaps never want to know. Uncomfortable reading sometimes, but worth it.

This server runs Debian Linux, and I've been running version 6 (Squeeze) for a long time. Squeeze was the first "LTS" release supported by Debian.

LTS stands for "Long Term Support" and is a tag used to denote longer than normal security updates and support. Well, we ran out of "long term" this week so I had to upgrade. Always a slightly worrying process on a live server but a quick hop-skip-and-a-dist-upgrade, it appears to have worked. Debian is one of the few computer operating systems that support OS upgrades without requiring a reinstall and it's a wonderful thing.

The only thing I have seen wrong afterwards so far is the calendar plugin for my blogging software (blosxom) : it broke with a Perl Storable byte-order issue. Easy to fix (at least temporarily) by disabling caching. Of course, I'll need to monitor it a bit more closely over the next day or so.

Hail Debian ;-)

The Stanwick Horse Mask is on show at the National Museum of Scotland in the Celts exhibition. I saw it at the British Museum and settled on it as a subject for a test painting. I need a lot of practice ... I am happy enough with it but only so far. More practice definitely required!

Right: Stanwick Horse Mask, Oil, 178x127mm

Note that this is not really a "mask" but an ornament attached to some sort of container or bucket, perhaps for ale. It is not very big (only about 10cm tall) but has a cartoon quality, well expressing the horse with an economy of style in the copper alloy. Probably from about 50 AD and dug up in Stanwick, North Yorkshire, in 1843. Details.