Monday 15 June 2009

My children have done this

Last year I saw the entries for the Turner Prize on display at Tate Britain.

A model sitting on a toilet wasn't quite enough to prompt me to action.

After all, I'm beyond bored with Brit art and the like. Corpses hanging from trees, people with penises growing from their faces, a pile of soil, a heap of bricks, celery, tin foil... a squatting dummy seems rather tame.

It wasn't that which prompted Grit to shift herself from her chair. No.

It was a passing comment by a Dior-clad uber tart in a London art gallery who, dripping perfumed couture and diamonds in front of a pool of yellow paint splashed over a bedsheet, declared loudly, 'It really annoys me when people say "My child could have done that!"'

That was it.

Each month, nine-year olds Squirrel, Shark and Tiger worked a day with me on this project. First we visited Whipsnade wildlife animal park, taking observational sketches. Next we looked at the work of painters listed here. Then we studied colour, form, composition, line. We converted a bathroom to a studio. There, we tried all styles of brushstroke. We worked with different qualities of acrylic. We mixed, matched, blended, sketched, considered, talked, painted, cried, laughed. Then I marched to the local community art space, booked the space for two weeks, Dig made the posters, and we spent Sunday putting up the art.

And this is my children's exhibition. It's called HIDE! If you can't come along, here are the paintings on the walls.











And here is a little of the behind-the-scenes work.




Uber tart, My children did that.

17 comments:

Jax Blunt said...

that's fabulous.

Have you done a press release? (only partly tongue in cheek...)

Michelle said...

fab :-).

Firebird said...

Brilliant! Congratulations to the gritlets and to you for putting it all together.

Sam said...

Yes, brilliant! I love them :-)

Dani said...

Breathtaking!

Grit said...

thank you, people, I have passed on all your comments. We gave the project a big thumbs up, and Tiger says she even learned something!

RubbishParent said...

F***ing Brilliant.

Damien Hirst is building some sort of artistic abbatoir for a few bazillion pounds not far from our house.

I should pop down there and tell him to quit now.

Are any of them for sale?

Rubbish Parent
http://blog.rubbishparenting.net

Green V-Neck said...

That's amazing. Great work!

globeonmytable said...

Wow!

Merry said...

Completely love it.

ummrashid said...

Really inspiring!

kelly said...

This is very wonderful - well done Grit and gritlets.

Irene said...

Absolutely fabulous and I mean that seriously and you should have a reporter come by and cover that. I mean it. It's such a great effort and the results are wonderful. You guys do some fantastic projects and they deserve some recognition.

Grit said...

thank you again folks! theoretically the paintings are for sale (at £10 each) so we can think about enterprise and creativity. whether the artists will actually accept any offer, hmm, we could be learning some ideas about loss and insolvency pretty quick!

irene, we kept advance notice fairly low profile ... er ... just in case we came to the day and didn't have anything to exhibit ... (oh, grit, how can you possibly lack confidence?!)

R. Molder said...

I love it when you present their art on this blog! Seriously great compositions and it's so fantastic that they've learned framing. I didn't learn that until college! Bravo!!!

Elizabeth (My Reading World) said...

What wonderful work--and kudos for you to booking the hall. I would never have thought of that!

Let them know we were mighty impressed.

Jude said...

Fantastic, looks like you had a great time. It must be wonderful to have such a good exhibition space close by which you can book. They're like gold dust around here - too few of them, and over-subscribed.