February and March: Sunday in the sitting room with art

It’s Sunday afternoon, school looms large. The fun of Friday Championship Manager and chips is over. Pizza Saturday and late-night Match of the Day is gone. Sunday league in the park is over. Sunday afternoon is here. Sunday afternoon means homework. Homework means procrastination. Procrastination means I’ll be at this desk until bed. I may as well be at school.

The biggest bane of my existence is art homework. Try as I might I can't seem to do it. In English the pen sits fluently in my hand. I dance across the page with it. We’re in symbiosis with one another, quick-stepping to the maximum word-count in no time at all. However, a pencil is different. It doesn’t seem to fit when we’re in hold. We appear to be working against one another, leading the other astray. The end result is a mess that’s sure to achieve derision from my teacher.

And it doesn’t matter what the discipline is, each piece is dreadful in its own way. My still life is not a mirror image, rather a cloning experiment gone terribly awry. More Mr Hyde than Dolly the Sheep. I fare little better with portraiture. My self-portrait is something that could be taken in for questioning, used as evidence by my Head of Year to interrogate me on happiness and self-worth: Are you ok? It’s just this picture with its big ears and big teeth and small body points to a young man that isn’t. “I just struggle with proportion and scale” would be my defence. And as for Pop Art? My artwork is problematic with one drawing, reproducing it again and again just multiplies the tragedy. Like Boris Johnson on fatherhood.



My art homework takes two hours to do, yet it is the piece I receive the lowest mark for. I’m not naturally intelligent. Most of the time at school my effort pays off, yet with art there is definitely a ceiling on my talent and try as I might I can’t seem to break through. (Although I’ve used the glass ceiling metaphor, I want you to know that I’m not equating my teenage struggle with a sketch book with womenkind’s fight to overcome the patriarchy).

In one moment of desperation I even have my dad do my art work. He knows that I like to do well in things and pities my weekly turmoil. He asks what I have to do. I tell him that the task this week is to draw a pair of shoes. My dad is artistic: he did a nice stencil above our fireplace. Within 45 minutes, he’s done a more than serviceable job. I hand it into my teacher who gives it a C -. Keeler, next to me, gets an A -. Keeler has drawn one shoe. He hasn’t even fulfilled the brief. When it comes to art work at school, I am cursed, predestined to fail, regardless of my efforts or deceits. At the end of Year 9 I drop art and a weight is lifted. My parents breathe a sigh of relief.



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I’m older now. I’m in an art gallery through choice. Grayson Perry has led me here. I watched his series on the class system, where he spent a week with each sphere and produced a piece at the end of it. He isn’t like the artists I picture. There are no airs and graces to Grayson. He has an Essex accent and unrestrained cackle. I like him because he’s less interested in replicating fruit, more in mirroring society. In studying human behaviour, there’s something Dickensian about him, an author whose medium is a pot as opposed to a pen. Through him I become more interested in other artists, respecting the craft and rigour that’s gone into their work.

 

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I’m even older now. My little boy sits with my wife at the table. His face is a mess of colours; his apron a riot of paint. They do this so regularly that our downstairs loo has now been converted into gallery space. Every three months the exhibition changes (currently visitors can chinstroke their way round Julia Donaldson characters). I haven’t done much in the way of art with Kit. Harriet has a confidence with it; I have not. 

This is stupid. 

At Kit’s age, at any age really, art should be about expression. When you have a child, it’s about something even more important: bonding. I read to Kit; I dance with Kit; I play hide and seek with him – activities very much in my wheelhouse. But it would be good to do something out of my comfort zone, to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty: together. Over the next month therefore I’m going to sit at the table and do some arts and crafts with my little boy. Art that won’t be graded. Art very much for art’s sake. Yes, those leaden Sunday afternoons of yesteryear are going to be daubed over in a graffiti of colours and exuberance. That's right: I’m going to make Sundays great again.



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