I once used "art critics" as an example of people as skilled as some academics at blowing out nonsense that is perceived as a vast intellectual exercise by students and other academics.

My paper today tossed me an example of an art critic that I really had to share:

Hayes' loopy paintings demonstrate the power of what might be called a tenacious spontaneity to pack the jolt of the freshly perceived. The brightly colored, ambiguous narratives of women, men, dogs and birds are at once goofy and a trifle ominous, offering something like the inexplicable emotional ballast of a dream.

"All you can do is keep on changing bits until it becomes right and inevitable as far as you can see,'' says Hayes, who will paint over something that doesn't feel right to her, leaving traces of the earlier forms still evident on the canvas. "But it has to look like its own self, not last week's painting. If it turns out in some unknown way, if it looks right but unfamiliar -- then it may be finished."

Her unconventional working methods (which owe some debt to the surrealists and their faith in the unconscious to produce images that reflect something true about the human soul) are the product of both an unconventional upbringing and unconventional training.

Hayes was home-schooled in rural Scotland until the age of 13, certainly a tonic to trusting one's own intuition. And her most influential training was with a regional British artist and teacher named Roy Oxlade, an iconoclast who is of the opinion "that the whole art world edifice is due for demolition." (For more about Oxlade, visit artspacegallery.co.uk)

I've seen critics go on like that first paragraph for two whole pages. Like someone juggling bowling balls and flaming torches, it's fascinating and utterly without meaning. The creative process described by the artist, and the results, are indistinguishable from those generated by a five-year-old.

Oh, please click on the Oxlade link.

The more I followed this up, the better it got. At the Spratt Gallery link on Hayes, another critic weighed in:

These are brave paintings, crazy, generous and arresting. They offer...a sense of immediacy and echoes of the distant past...

[They] appear to have nothing to do with virtual experiences, with the web of simultaneous connections to which we may now subscribe with such enchanting ease.

Georgia Hayes' paintings have deeper roots...connections...with older patterns of human behavior: the urge for metaphor and for finding a correspondence between moments in our own and [other's] lives through the paradoxical language of art [and] ritual, and myth...[both] awesomely direct and elusive.

Where do they go to learn to sling it like this? I couldn't make this stuff up.