22. Read the text below. There are 13 mistakes in the text. Find and correct the mistakes.

Jack Vettriano is the Britain’s most popular artist, outselling Dali, Monet and Van Gogh. Yet, while even the Queen has embraced the phenomenon of Jack Vettriano, the art establishment stands accused for blackballing him and “running scared” of public opinion. Vettriano’s images of beaches, butlers and lovers have come to adorn everything from posters and cards to mugs and umbrellas, but the nation’s major galleries have never displayed a single example of the real thing.

Anyone wishing to see an original Vettriano must to travel to Scotland’s Kirkcaldy Art Gallery, who has two. Last night the artist, a former mining engineer from Fife, launched a withering attack on the cultural elite that leaves him out in the cold. In a rare interview, Vettriano said:”The art world is not a lot to do with art; it’s to do with money and power and position. Annually the national galleries is given a budget of taxpayers’ money and they should spend it for behalf of the people of Great Britain, but I feel they don’t. If they’ve decided you fit what they like, you’ll be in; if they’ve made up their minds otherwise, you never will be. I appear to be in the last category. If they were truly buying for the people of Great Britain then they will buy my work, that is as clear as day. But they don’t. I have days when I couldn’t care less, and other days when I wonder why does the gulf exists. There’s a snob association: when something’s too popular it’s regarded as a bit trashy. But I would rather my paintings sell to ordinary people, rather than being stacked in a store house at the National Gallery.”

Vettriano has sold more than three million poster reproductions around the world and earns an estimated £500,000 a year from the royalties. The works themselves disappear from public view into the hands of private collectors; with buyers including Hollywood star Jack Nicholson, composer Sir Tim Rice and British actor Robbie Coltrane. The most highest price to date was for a painting called Embracing, which fetched £98,000 at auction in Edinburgh last month.

Admitting he was not a fan of the type of works that win the Turner Prize each year, the self-taught painter, known for his erotically charged figurative scenes, added: “I personally like to see craftsmanship, I like to look at paintings where somebody has worked very hard to learn how to do it and you can feel the pain. I’m not dismissive about contemporary art because we all have our own priorities. There is room for everybody.” Supporters of Vettriano claim that as a traditional artist he is the victim of snobbery which favours “cutting edge” contemporary art such as Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde, Tracey Emin’s unmade bed and Grayson Perry’s pots. As Vettriano’s popularity continues to grow, pressure is growing on the galleries.

23. EXAM LINK. Work in pairs to speak about the artist you appeal to.

You should say:

Who he or she is and how you knew about this person

What style he / she works in

What inspires the artist

What features his / her paintings include

And explain what appeals to you most of all.

Example:

I could start off by saying that I’m keen on artists who are passionate about painting mountains. So, one of my favourite painters is Nikolai Rerikh, a prominent Russian artist of versatile talents, who at the beginning of the 20th century gained worldwide fame not only for his art, but his spiritual philosophy. Mostly he is known as the landscape painter. His paintings are exhibited in several museums including the State Museum of Oriental Arts in Moscow; the Russian State Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia; the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow; various art museums in India; and Art Gallery in Gorlovka, Ukraine, where I was happy to see a collection of his works.

Talking about the source of his inspiration, the first thing I should mention is that his artwork was developed under the influence of two primary things: his active life in Russian and Ukrainian culture, and a tour through Asia in the 1920’s. So, at the beginning of his career he was inspired to paint on canvas some incredible fantastic histories of early Slavic societies. These soulful Russian-Ukrainian pieces comprised his early career as an artist. The subject of his early works is pre-Christian Slavic mythologies, and the fantastically drawn dwellings and idols of ancient Slavs which are beautiful, mysterious, and slightly unsettling. In his canvases Rerikh did not attempt to feature actual historical events, he created, rather, a specific type of pictures of the past poeticizing the life of the ancient Slavs: the military campaigns, the building of new towns, the development of new lands, the hunting.

His journey to Asia, which was his quest for spiritual enlightenment, led him to a sharper turn toward esoteric spiritual philosophies which are reflected in his later works. In fact, his Asian journey in which he visited Tibet, India, and China, inspired him to create artworks to capture his impressions. His paintings depict the Tibetan mountains and Chinese deserts, with all the weird religious trappings of those places. Actually, his imaginative scenes captured the stunning beauty of the real Asian sights he visited. Moreover, Nikolai Rerikh and his family lived in the Kulu Valley in the Himalayas. Therefore, many of his paintings show the surrounding mountains, the great peaks of Tibet, the blooming valley, mysterious temples, its people and their legends. He imparted to that world a harmony and beauty which he failed to find in modern bourgeois society.

On top of what I’ve already said I could add what appeals to me most of all. It is, first of all, the stylistic peculiarities of Rerikh’s compositions, which help the viewer to see a singular world – enormous, sturdy and strong. Whatever he painted, ships with heavy sails, hills and mountains, human figures, all seem to be carved out of stone. One can’t but admire the vivid colours with but a few combinations, the smooth unbroken contours of the objects, the calm rhythm of the massive forms – all these things are conducive to creating an impression of clarity and monumentality.

Summing it up, I should say that the landscape in Rerikh’s works is assigned an important role because its treatment by the artist betrays his pantheistic world outlook. The artist succeeded in revealing a spiritual unity between human beings and nature which is, in his mind, inseparably linked with human activities.