The Beginning of Art

Thanks mum

I’m a child of the Seventies. In a nutshell this means that a lot of my childhood was spent attempting to find ways to amuse myself. My mum was a great one for finding you jobs to do if you so much as uttered the word ‘bored’ within five hundred yards of her.

Looking busy with few resources was a skill I learned early on and which has been surprisingly useful ever since. Unlike learning how to survive quicksand, which has not been as prevalent in my life as I once thought it would be thanks to Public Information Films.

My mum was also a hippy in disguise. She didn’t look like the archetypal hippy, hence the disguise bit, but her nature was about 90% hippy, 10% anarchist. This meant eschewing Findus Crispy Pancakes with a firm hand and instead filling us with home made yoghurt, home grown vegetables and a strong need to question everything.

What has this got to do with art, I hear you ask?

Making is the answer to that. The questioning bit also helps.

All art involves making, and a great deal of my childhood was spent surrounded by people who made things with their hands as a matter of course. It wasn’t called art of course. It was just what you did to get by. There wasn’t much money floating about, so things just had to be made or mended most of the time.

My mum was a powerhouse of creativity. She cooked everything we ate, except for bread which she was terrible at. She sewed and knitted most of the things we wore. She was a dab hand at most DIY jobs and particularly talented at tiling. She gardened like a fiend and grew a lot of what we ate. She pickled and preserved, chopped logs, made curtains, hung wallpaper and raised us to help out, despite the fact that we hated it all at the time.

She was also naturally artistic in the more accepted way of thinking about art. She painted and sketched. She made tapestries and patchworks. She made beautiful, cloth covered boxes with tassels for handles and drawers which she would fill with things and give as gifts. She made rag dolls, stitching their hair and faces and making all their clothes. She had a strong aesthetic sense and made even the most boring of things beautiful when she could. And she had endless curiosity about the world, which is a thing of beauty in itself, and which she passed on to us.

I wanted to make things like her, but I was too impatient to learn well and she was too impatient (and frankly exhausted by life) to teach me. She did try, despite everything and I have vivid memories of her showing my brother and I how to make potato prints, tie-dye and marbling, making our own wrapping paper, crafting papier mache bowls, sewing samplers with binka, turning marzipan into tiny fruits and putting them in some of her home-made boxes. She even taught us how to weave branches together to make walls for a den and how to make bows and arrows.

And we had freedom to make things ourselves. We cut and collaged, glued and stuck, painted and sewed. We dressed up and created plays and imaginary worlds. We were allowed to handle tools and matches. We were allowed to break things and attempt to mend things. We were allowed to use our imaginations and to make mess. Mess was always allowed as long as we cleared up.

I remember wanting to be good at art. I remember being frustrated that I wasn’t good like her. I remember getting frustrated over and over again, but looking back now, I realise the gift was that I was allowed to keep trying. I remember starting a million things and generally giving up fairly quickly on everything I started, but I remember being allowed.

Being allowed and allowing myself got knocked out of me later, when school started but those first few years were a pretty good bedrock for most of life and all of the art that came after.

For me, making and questioning are fundamental to meaningful art, as is the mess we make along the way. It turns out that in my old age, I’m not as bad at that trinity as I’d previously imagined. I just needed to re-learn to give myself permission.