The Curse of the Crying Boy painting.

In 70s and 80s working class Scotland so many houses had this painting (we had the crying boy and crying girl painting).

I remember the sun cursed stories in the mid 80s and when looking to find who painted these pictures I found the whole story.

Will Tom D and I be the only ones who remember these paintings/story?

https://drdavidclarke.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/cryingboy2.jpg

I seem to remember my parents throwing them out when we moved house in 1991.

https://drdavidclarke.co.uk/urban-legendary/the-curse-of-the-crying-boy/

I remember them! And I remember being vaguely aware that they were considered bad luck. I'm looking forward to reading that, thanks.

i remember reading the story many years ago, i'm not sure i've ever seen any of those pictures in the wild tho

yeah i was thinking that maybe you, onimo and noodle vague might be the ones who would remember them.

There was an episode of Rab C Nesbitt once with Jack Milroy in it and he was selling a load of junk and the painting was one of them. So many people must have recognised it and smiled.

The blaze broke out in a chip-pan in the kitchen of their home of 27 years and spread rapidly.

topical on ilx

http://www.mdig.com.br/imagens/arte/menino_chorao.jpg

^Is this one? Still pretty popular kitsch item in Portugal...

We had eyes followy Jesus, the actual blueskinned Nubian kids, a few other standards but never saw crying boy

daniel different painting but I think it has the similar curse as mentioned in the article. The whole thing is worth reading

the actual blueskinned Nubian kids

you know that sounds familiar too

my Nan i think had a little print of "The Haywain", other than that most of my family were more about family photos and ceramic knick-knacks than paintings. my Dad had a Constable print and a couple of Lowry prints in later years, also an authentic Jody Craddock print that my brother got him i think, i assume we're saving that one for Antiques Roadshow

https://drdavidclarke.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/cryingboy2.jpg

https://drdavidclarke.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/cryingboy1.jpg

these are the two mentioned in the article

cursed images: let's get together and pin down the aesthetic!

crying boy:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DDx3rb6UwAA_F_-.jpg

Mark there is NO WAY you had that crying boy painting in your house. I am quite certain of that!

My mum bought a couple of shitty old dusty b+w reproductions of mediocre paintings of swans and windmills from 2nd hand shops in the 70's. I mean it was bad enough having a b+w tv w/ valves as well, but these paintings were dog-rough awful. But she did get one colour reproduction of a famous Millet of idealised peasants working the land with haystacks (not the wrestler) in the background, which was also awful.

Are these distinctively different from the "gypsy boy crying" ones?

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/a1/0f/d8/a10fd8740268fcef460befe7a366bc49.jpg

this has been in my mum and dad's house (not theirs tho: not on a wall and only there for storage purposes):
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dmiSN7b34Gg/Uhecu9jd_iI/AAAAAAAAXzE/O4AkN9f-rpk/s1600/Wings-of-Love-by-Steven-Pearson.jpg

I have never seen any walls with flying ducks on them in the wild. Or anybody with a 'muriel'.

Id quite like to.

hhaha mark is that not an ELP album cover?

it is as you all know -- tho i didn't when i first came across it at mum and dad's -- a famous artefact from a well known TV drama

also inspired the Tom Jones song "Sex Swan"

shd have been the cover of LOVE BEACH yes (tho it wd not have made love beach any less terrible within)

its the muriel isnt it?

my friend dr vick aka dr quack has some very nice wooden flying ducks, which i gave her

sadly the internet has no very good pictures of the muriel, which was more or less just an alpine scene iirc

I had no idea it was featured in Abigail's Party! its been 20 odd years since I saw that mind

Wings of Love (c.1972), is a painting by Stephen Pearson.[1] The painting depicts a muscular naked man who is delivered to a woman on the wing-tip of a gigantic swan in a scene.[2] The swan was "cemented in the imagination as a creature of romance for a whole generation of impressionable working class suburban kids" and the anthropomorphic projection wasn't entirely random.[3] Swans are believed to take a mate for life and the graceful white birds might symbolise monogamous felicity.[4]
Reproduction

After the World War Two, shops such as Woolworths sold large numbers of colourful and sentimental or 'exotic' prints.[5] As a commercially reproduced picture, ‘Wings of Love’ was sold ready-framed in many high street outlets, and became a best-selling image in the early 70s.[6] By 1992, 2.5 million copies of 'Wings of Love' had been sold with many sales outside of the UK.[7]

"You can still buy it and in Scandinavia it's still on their bestseller list. When it was first available in 1972 its popularity was due to its encapsulation of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius - freedom. Plus it's a bit rude." - Wayne Hemmingway[8]

The most notable appearance of ‘Wings of Love’ was in a mural commissioned for a wall beside one of Saddam Hussein's many swimming pools in his palace.[9] The mural was recreated in the form of a projection on the wall of the Platform Arts Gallery in Belfast, in February 2011, as part of Angela Darby & Robert Peter’s exhibition Saddam’s Babylon “to consider the ways in which cultural value operates and its absurd nature.”[10] In the exhibition, Taste: The New Religion, at Manchester's Cornerhouse Arts Centre, 'Wings of Love' finds a place beside pictures by Tretchikoff, John Lynch and Peter Lightfoot as an example of the independent course of popular taste.[11] Andrea Patrick Byrne, an award-winning London based artist, references ‘Wings of Love’ in her 2014 audiovisual self-portrait ‘Girlhood.’[12]
Popular culture

The popular print house Athena owed much of its resurgence in 1980s to selling fantasy-world style of gloriously kitsch prints such as Unicorn Princess, Beach Lovers and A Dolphin Moon that were inspired by Stephen Pearson.[13] ‘Wings of Love’ was immortalised on the Ogdens' wall in Coronation Street[14] and the painting also achieved cult status by its appearance in Mike Leigh's 1977 film Abigail's Party.[15] In Abigail’s Party, the painting provokes a heated debate on the nature of "erotic art", culminating in Alison Steadman's husband dropping dead of a heart attack. The Bob Hoskins film Mona Lisa also features the ‘Wings of Love’ as part of recurring references to surrealism.[16]

lol saddam's pool

Muriel sledding xps

best one I could find. Plus it has Stan Ogden and Eddie Yeats

http://i.imgur.com/3J8mOlk.jpg

Sadly all three are no longer with us :(

the shop that sold these various kinds of prints in shrewsbury in the 60s and 70s (i mean the crying children, tretchikov's green lady etc) was -- as i mainly used it -- a bookshop called wildings: it has a first floor of books, and a ground floor of decorative arts tat, which i generally barely even looked at in my hurry to reach the floor with the books

the only pictures that did make an impression were (it seemed like) quite a large number of moon surfaces with a nearby large planet (or sun) dominating the sky, knockoff chesley bonestell i guess, tho i didn't know his name then

http://www.outer-space-art-gallery.com/images/bonestell1.jpg

^^^this is a bonestell, the ones i remember i feel were moodier and bleaker than this

wait that wikipedia article says (like abigail and saddam) stan and hilda had wings of love on their wall, yet plainly they didn't

hah, so it does. Unless there was a small painting hung on the wall out of shot. I doubt it though.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_hh2XIr_sWDQ/Sk5VTu2E1RI/AAAAAAAAATs/9d8Hym1a4Yw/s320/Eddie+Yeats+%26+Hilda+Ogden+12.png

is this a different angle or a different era?

I only remember the muriel and flying ducks so I assume that's all there was

xp

It looks more like the early 80s when eddie left and kevin webster replaced him?

ok full (not very exciting) story here: http://coronationstreet.wikia.com/wiki/Mural

no wings of love, that is clearly internet fabulation

it looks like its further over to the right of the room?

heh, suzie birchall. She was in and out of it multiple times wasnt she? Bit like kevin websters dad and jenny bradley

i forgot there was 2 versions of the muriel

In March 1977 the mural was damaged when Suzie Birchall attempted to clean Elsie Tanner's chimney cheaply by dropping a brick down the flue. Unfortunately she chose the wrong chimney pot and the brick dropped into the Ogdens', house, covering Stan, Hilda, the room and the mural in black soot. The mountain vista continued to have a fog of dark clouds covering it for another eighteen months until August 1978, when Hilda discovered that she and Stan paid the same amount of water rates as Elsie Tanner, living singly, next door and she insisted Stan have more baths in order to get their full money's worth. A very reluctant Stan fell asleep in the bath with the taps on and the water flowed downstairs covering the mural and creating an effect of river deep, mountain soggy.
Incomplete

The second version from 1978 complete with ducks

Tearing the paper when she attempted to repair it, Hilda was inconsolable over her lost work of art. To make up for the ruined mural, Stan got hold of another scene. This time it was a cliffside seascape and Hilda forgave Stan.

i probably stopped watching when they dropped jilted john as a character

http://www.shuttleworths.co.uk/gdf/images/tilsley.jpg

you dont remember brian tilsley stabbed to death?

no we'd switched to brookside in our house by then, we were very rigorous

i dimly remember a while after the jilted john storyline there was a gloomy punky proto-goth lass who listened to joy division -- i had it in mind she was len fairclough's daughter or niece but can find no trace of such a person by that description -- she had dark hair and a stroppy outlook

Had it started then? I watched Brookside quite early on and introduced my mum to it :)

I gave them all up early 00s

hmmm i dont recall rita and len having kids. Jenny Bradley as rita's stepdaughter is all i remember and she had red hair

Jack and Vera had this on their wall.

http://www.artnet.com/WebServices/images/ll00232lldu74GFgPEyO3CfDrCWvaHBOcOJ5D/francisco-rodr%C3%ADguez-clement-the-red-skirt.jpg

Big Tindersticks fans, were they?

Remember this one? All over the internet in the early 2000s, people were coming out with all kinds of bizarre claims about it. It is pretty creepy, to be fair.

https://orion-uploads.openroadmedia.com/lg_6ee8e8-HauntedPaintings_TheHandsResistHim.jpg

On the subject of the Crying Boy paintings, I do recall hearing a Radio 4 documentary about the phenomenon some time back which I think basically concluded The Sun had made the whole thing up, based on a couple of house fires where by sheer coincidence, copies of that painting had been present. I remember the loathsome Kelvin MacKenzie having a good chuckle about it.

Her husband was Uncle Rab and he used to shout all the time, not in rage just everything he said was shouted. He had the oiley teddy-boy hairstyle which was dyed black, now that I think about it. The whole experience of going to their house was frightening.

there was a fancy lamp shop at the bottom of mardol* which sold those exact same indoor-water-feature lamps -- they were very plasticky and the droplets of water looked like more like oil** (or even glue), at least when you peered through the window

*in shrewsbury again obviously, it was a mecca for combination fancy yet vulgar tat
**maybe it was an indoor hair oil feature

I remember in George & Mildred they had a lava lamp thing that the rich brother in law hated. I seem to recall a fair few people had similar lamps at the time (nobody in our family though)

Stirmonster will be able to confirm if she was the joy division character btw. He's a corrie expert

I'll alert him:)

Already did :)

if anyone is gonna remember a joy division tshirt on corrie it's him!

actually maybe i thought it was oil because of lava lamps (which i think wildings mentioned above sold for a while) and i kind of imagined the venus de milo thing was a sort of victorian attempt at a lava lamp: the fancy lamp shop was much too up itself to sell lava lamps (but that's mardol for you, so up itself)

it wasn't a T-shirt! it was either listening on the radio, or just mentioning them as music better than someone else was listening to (it was a very brief mention! but it resonated and may even have been discussed in NME)

(which at some point did a big feature -- by ian penman -- on corrie, i should look that out also)

(xp) He will surely remember Emily Bishop having a blow on Spider's didgeridoo then...

https://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/coronationstreet/images/c/c1/Episode_4330.jpg

Mark it probably was oil because the drops fell slowly.

So lava lamps were quite a thing in the 70s then? Another thing I remember in houses (especially in my grans) were ornaments brought home from Holidays in Spain etc. She even had a windmill that you plugged in and it moved and played a tune. i loved that actually.

Other things were just wee ornaments with Ibiza or Lloret De Mar on it.

Other houses had fans. Not the electric kind. I think my gran may have had one that my cousins got her now I think of it

lol Tom. My mum mentioned the other day that Emily Bishop was supposedly visiting Spider and wasnt in corrie anymore. They should bring him back!

Oh they had a plastic Spanish dancer in a red dress with black lace ove the red and a comb thing in the nylon hair with a lace veil thing.

Thread is triggering me.

lava lamps were more like late 60s i think -- we had a little cheapie one which was blue wax in water rather than red or yellow benzene

oh i remember those too jed!! My gran didnt have one of those.

She did have these weird toilet roll dolls that mightve looked like that. Noone liked it and she chucked it in the coal fire!

We still use toilet roll dolls though haha

sharon gaskell wasn't the joy div fan. i know because i had a massive crush on her so would recall that extra bonus feature. i can totally remember the character being referred to who did listen to joy div but it is eluding me at the moment. i think my brain might be over saturated with corrie trivia and there is no brain power left to process it all. joy division have also had their music played on corrie many times. my fave was "decades" being "on the radio" in the kabin.

so much shit was brought back from continental holidays by so many brits lol

"Then there was Spider, who was a sort of crusty and toyed with Toyah Battersby's affections. (xxp)"

Just thought it would interest you that Spider actor Martin Hancock also played Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois in a pretty decent BBC French Revolution drama - Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution.

Ooooh, terrible man Collot d'Herbois, terrible man. Spider, on the other hand, was very nice.

This is a different picture to what we all had and was in The Sun. but bizarrely is seen as cursed for the same reason in europe as was mentioned by daniel upthread

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_Boy

I cant find a pic of the crying girl painting that we had with the one of the boy

it's not allowed on the internet as long as you can find the crying boy because of the curse

also: i'm going to bed now, perchance to dream of moons and saddam and oil features in corrie

Funnily enough my other 'alf covered the crying boy thing on his crime podcast Bloody Murder recently. Or at least I thought he had, maybe he was just talking about doing so.

Maybe stirmonster will remember by morning :)

xp

i already know i am going to be kept awake thinking about it.

in the meantime...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIj2Lpb4X0E

hahaha wtf!!

I mean it's not really

presuming that there's minimum a few dozen thousand prints of whatever counts as that generations livingroom decor in circulation

great form to make a big deal out of whatever human tragedies you can find in that most bella/NOW magazine humantragedyprone of large demographic subsets but hey misery/tabloids/ppl whatyagonnado

obviously i now have "jilted john" stuck in my head

I recall my Grandparents had the crying boy painting in their house in Renfrew Rd, Paisley when I was a nipper, also a crying clown portrait too, which wasn't scary.

My parents had a framed Vernon Ward print of geese flying - just went to look for that particular painting, and of course there are LOADS of Vernon Ward pictures of geese flying.

One of my dad's relations had the charging elephants picture over her fireplace, and a painting of JFK JR saluting his father's coffin. Perhaps the ultimate crying boy picture, even though he's not crying in it.

My other grandparents had Sacred Heart pictures (some with lamps in them) and plates of famous Renaissance shepherds and whatnot. The first time I went to the Louvre, there were so many pictures there I'd only ever seen in plate form.

The irish generation of post ww2 Fianna faillers had a seriously crazy JFK fixation ime

I remember a few brilliant holographic JFK and PJP2 prints in the hallways of my catholic friends houses.

I cant find a pic of the crying girl painting that we had with the one of the boy

― Odysseus, woensdag 5 juli 2017 23:59 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Is it this one?

https://img.discogs.com/jKxFWiBZ3n39a_7pUdc_qV-STyQ=/fit-in/600x598/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-325364-1223917566.jpeg.jpg

Nope. its by the same artist and style as the crying boy painting. she had blonde hair.

When i was wee I thought the painting of the boy was me as it looked a bit like me

cryingalgeriangoalkeeper.jpg

i googled crying girl and crying girl by Anna Zinkeisen and none of the results were of the painting we and what seemed like millions of others had

5 year old me
http://i.imgur.com/nKCQhgh.jpg

Everybody had one of these in the 1970s

http://i.imgur.com/qv3zIIP.jpg

more cursed images

Why, though?

how terribly terribly mean of mark s

Stirmonster who was the Coronation St character who liked Joy Division? We're all waiting!

"she expressed herself in many different ways"

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/55/a0/60/55a0608fd5ea4654352f34904f5ed6db.jpg

JD cover version on this maybe?

https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images1/360/0212/28/uk-lp-jack-howarth-ow-bizarre_360_2e493e753a6d6bd3bc3a930cb5464759.jpg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Q2uxR1n7Eps/hqdefault.jpg

https://dgeiu3fz282x5.cloudfront.net/g/l/lgPP32602.jpg

it was albert tatlock.

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