There are good paintings and then there are bad paintings, and then, well then there are downright awful paintings. I don't mean works that are particularly badly painted, some bad paintings are painted by great painters, they understand colour and line and form and composition but for one reason or another their choice of subjects are at the very best tepid.

Some bad art is so bad it's good, I remember a terrible print of a lousy painting that hung over the dining room table in my childhood, it depicted a pair of white horses running through the sands in front of an ocean at sunset. I knew it was terrible, even in those earliest of early years, in between the bouts of mum and dad arguing about money, work, bills, and other worries I'd sit and stare at it just to "get away" for a while.

Funnily enough my sister and I went through a phase at the time of cutting out images of cats of the sides of cat-food biscuit boxes and sticking them on our bedroom walls. We'd stare at them for ages as we fell asleep, eventually we could see them move, the heads rolling around in miniature MGM-like roars that made us yawn all the more, imagination was alive and well back in the 1970s, no consoles, TVS or the WWW for us, we had nothing, and that's no exaggeration.

Getting back to my point, bad paintings, some paintings deserve to be defaced, I'm sorry but it's true. If a painting says nothing, if it invokes the most plebeian of responses, "that's a nice tree", "what a pretty bird", "is that mountain in Scotland?" and "I wonder where that road leads to?", in fact that last rhetorical question is too good for the likes of the paintings I'm talking about.

There's one person I know would definitely be nodding in vociferous agreement if they happened by some strange stroke of fate to be reading this post as I write it, who knows, parallel worlds, conscious collective, it's all out there. The nodder in question is John Lytle Wilson, it's the sort of name I'd expect from an old and grisled blues player, but no John is a visual artist with impeccable taste, or rather he knows what he doesn't like and I couldn't agree with him more.

John grew up in South Carolina and completed his studies at Florida State where he now teaches (as well as Valodsta State), and is an artist in residence at 621 Gallery. John has a fascination with animals and robots alongside a healthy disrespect for advertising imagery and iconography and the power they hold over the human mind. He uses animals and robots as stand-ins for human characters, in particular his robots which allegorically represent a lack of free will, consciousness and indeed choice appeal to me greatly.

My favourite series of works by J.L. Wilson are his Corrected Paintings which as the title of this post precludes represent a uniquely creative backlash against the conformity of pedestrian art, puerile imagery and the mass consumption of pictorial representation without comment, be it social, political or in any other manner.

His "trashing and thrashing" of abandoned art is an inspiration to us all, you will never view a garage sale painting the same way again…

Autum Majesty by J. L. Wilson

Untitled by J. L. Wilson

Hot Robot Cold World by J. L. Wilson

Jimmylegs & Co. by J. L. Wilson

If you'd like to see more of John's Corrected Paintings click here.

To ee his other collections too including Robots and Monkeys, Icons and Exploding Robots, visit his online gallery.

This post is tagged advertising, animals, Corrected Paintings, iconography, J. W. Wilson, John Lytle Wilson, monkeys, robots