Children & Art

Amongst my catalogue of societal offences, surely amongst the most heinous is inflicting your child’s ‘art’ on innocent adults. You go into a presumably intelligent and sensitive doctor’s office and there defiling the otherwise tasteful walls is a picture consisting of splurges of discordant colours and appallingly scribbled lines that represent, according to the proud mother, a ‘space dinosaur’ or, just possibly, a blue sea anemone being savaged by orange vultures. She is not entirely sure, but feels a bizarre obligation to share the wretched thing with her unfortunate patients.

In such circumstances, it is hard to know what constitutes an adequate response. My approach is to quietly ignore the daubs as one might an eructation at a formal dinner party. If pressed, I might sheepishly grin and make appreciative ‘mnnn’ noises. On the one occasion I have been forced to volunteer a more substantial opinion, I was somewhat over the top:

“It puts me in mind of the later works of the great Cy Twombly. The sheer lyric elegance of the purple bit offset by that frenzied orange splurge! The architectonics! Can it be anything else than a subtly ironic analysis of the human condition in and of itself?” This was greeted with a stunned silence as my hostess evidently considered calling in the authorities.

The urge to display one’s offspring’s artistic output should be resisted at all costs. Displaying it is not an act of love; rather, it is soft headed or guilt-ridden romanticism. The child may burst into the world “trailing paths of glory”; however, he does not enter it with a degree in fine arts. Henri Rousseau’s Tigre dans une tempête tropicale may be naive and exude a childlike view of the world, but the artist was 47 years old when he painted it and had years of experience behind him. A fir cone splattered with a dab of blue paint and adorned with a twisted paperclip is not remotely in the same league; it is neither testimony to your child’s innate artistic talents; nor is it evidence of a nascent Picasso or Braque; nor is it a uniquely valuable insight into the profundities of his infant soul. It is simply a fir cone splattered with a dab of blue paint and adorned with a twisted paperclip.

So why display the vile things? To be perfectly honest, you don’t really like little Justin’s garish daubs, but somehow feel duty-bound to treasure them; certainly his poorly paid teacher doesn’t despite describing the works as ‘awesome’ artistic expressions; and, as for Justin, he would willingly swap his entire output of sand encrusted collages and potato prints for a decent Batman poster.