ART REPORT - NAN SPURWAY

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.