Plan for art

Sundays are planning days chez Grit, and for lack of any other plan, I drive the gritlets to Whipsnade. Once here I declare we will plan art for the gritlet exhibition next year.

And there is a plan for this exhibition too, somewhere. I just have to remember what it is, and put it back on track. I know this type of disciplined forward thinking to create a product might go against all the grain for autonomous, spontaneous learning, but please bear in mind we are now dealing with the Grit life/death balance, so go easy on me.

Planning for this exhibition is Grit's antidote to the millions of bits of artwork hourly produced here at the Pile by the triplet art factory, and the output is one in which poor dumb Grit drowns, routinely.

In fact I will argue that this project is also educational because it is an attempt to encourage the gritlets to tackle a long-term goal in a steady, thoughtful manner. Consider too that it takes a special kind of gritty vigilance to actually maintain this plan for more than fifteen seconds and to negotiate it over a lengthy period of time with three little gritlets who'd like to think they can get away with scribbling out a horse hoof in yellow wax crayon and considering the entire project done and dusted.

What's more, come the exhibition, I've suggested to the gritlets that next June we could try and flog the art and turn the enterprise into a business project. In case you are appalled, I can say Shark is totally enthused by this idea of making a few quid and has already turned out three paintings which she says should pay for a laptop. In fact if she carries on with this enthusiasm I might just get cheeky and contact Saatchi.

Anyway, Shark wants to paint a picture of a seal underwater, and her first step is to snap away 120 pictures on Grit's phone camera until it and the seal both squeal.

Shark's next step will be to draw and draw, while misguided Grit hovers about, muttering unhelpful stuff like compositioncolourlineshaperhythm which possibly just gets in everyone's way.

Next, Shark has to put up with Grit being a right little madam because Grit won't let go of the acrylic paints and paintbrushes until Shark has selected one sketch and redrawn that sketch using lots of different colours, reaching a finished piece that she is 110% happy to reproduce on canvas.

Only then will Grit let go of the paint and paintbrushes, and work can begin in the studio (aka the downstairs bathroom with the canvas propped up on a stepladder).

And here's stage one of Shark's new piece, which we call research.





And so you can see the process in action, and the carefully planned stages of this forward thinking project, I'll post pictures of stage two. If I remember.