Is anyone one else watching this?
I've watched over the past couple of years along with more recently the Portrait Artist program.
For those who don't watch, they get 8 painters who have been selected on the basis of a submitted painting, to paint a landscape.
Over the past couple of years there's been a few odd pictures but mainly the people going through to the semis and finals are able to actually paint some sort of version of the landscape in front of them...which I thought was vaguely the point of the show.
This year however each winner of the heats have been really obscure. Another week they were in these beautiful water gardens with lakes, trees, a little bridge (you get the idea) but the girl who won paint a bright orange version of part of a marble statue.
This week they were in Scotland with an amazing castle, landscaped gardens, sky, sea etc etc and the winner painted some trees in a palette of only black & greys.
I get they want to be edgey and different, but surely the whole point of taking the artists somewhere is to get them to paint that vista, and not something totally out of their imagination. They could just put them in a room and tell them to get on with it. It's almost as if you paint what you see, that's not good enough!
I'm so disappointed as I've been waiting ages for this to come on. I don't even mind that they've got rid of Frank Skinner, who was actually ok on this show.