ART LINE
BY
NAN
SPURWAY
“He
winked at me”
This gorgeous little painting was done
by an eight year old, going on nine. Her
patience I have yet to come across either in an adult or another child. She is now ten years old and still insists on
painting with a tiny size 0 or 1 paint brush, no matter how large her
challenge. To give you an idea, at present she is painting a whole bunch of
seals lying on top of each other asleep on some island. And she goes about painting them
painstakingly with this tiny brush. Her
father shakes his head and asks her why she doesn’t use a much larger brush as
the other young artists do, including myself (an old artist), and she
replies: “I go for detail, and I enjoy
painting with my special little brush!”
So no matter what I suggest, I cannot budge her technique and quite
frankly I would be silly to do so, as her results are amazing and very
realistic. She achieves the tiniest contours, and the slightest change in
colour to suit the image. Often she doesn’t agree with what she observes in the
image and puts in her own colours and I must say I have to agree. I am
beginning to think she can teach me a thing or two!
Once I gave her one of my expensive artists’
colours for a specific tone that she required, and the following week when she
arrived she said she needed a little more to finish a section. Firstly allow me to explain, this little girl
is quiet, sits patiently and waits her turn while others constantly call for my
attention, and this particular day I forgot about the ‘special’ colour.
Eventually when I remembered I was full of apologies, and she looked up at me
and said: “Don’t worry I have mixed my own colour.” I was flabbergasted; her
mixed colour was identical to my ‘special’ colour.
When she first began art lessons, she
used to find fairies everywhere in pictures and paintings, I did not discourage
her as she had a beautiful mind. She conjured up colours and situations with
mist and hills and flowing gowns and I sometimes thought I would like to be in
a world of such wonder in order to paint what she sees. However, while she was painting her little
elephant, she came up to me and said quietly:
“Do you know my elephant has just winked at me.” It told me that there
was an immediate association between artist and the image itself, and that is
how it should be.
Often an artist can feel there is
something wrong with their painting and until it is sorted out, the artist will
not rest. Perhaps he or she will wake at three in the morning and realise what
the problem is, and immediately jump out of bed, go and fix it, then trot off
back to bed and sleep like a baby.
