The Creative Impulse

The strand, which showcases the best of international feature documentaries, makes a much appreciated return to a UK production with Sarah Feltes's film which looks at the untapped artistic resources of the human brain.

In Painting the Mind we met two men who share an obsession: neither of them can stop making art. This is not because they are driven or ambitious, but because they're brain damaged. Tommy McHugh is a Scouse builder with a criminal past, then one morning he was poleaxed by two strokes. Jon Sarkin, a chiropractor from Massachusetts, suffered with a noise like a fire alarm going off between his ears for a year, until an operation to put it right caused a stroke, necessitating the removal of half his cerebellum.

Great art movements and the paintings that inspired them

"The peacock's tail," said Charles Darwin, "makes me sick." That's because the theory of evolution as adaptation can't explain why nature is so beautiful. It took the concept of sexual selection for Darwin to explain that, a process that has more to do with aesthetics than the practical.