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| _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
Make Me An Offer: Masterpiece
for Sale
Your child could paint that? So could my niece
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
The artist speaks only through her work. Her expressive
brushstrokes interrogate rather than resolve her
inner world, exploding onto unconventional drawing
surfaces in order to challenge the fixed forms imposed
by gallery convention. Here, a white plant pot in the
shape of a truncated cone and containing a miniature
Christmas tree provides a comment on the circularity
of time and a potent critique of banal seasonal
imagery. Offers in the region of £15,000 considered.
Now I freely admit that the artist is my two-year-old
niece, and I just made up that entire blurb. But I’m
still holding out for the money. After all, she’d only be
joining a trend. “Fingers” Freddie Linsky is the same
age and he exhibits on Saatchi Online and has been
offered an exhibition in Berlin. It seems that child artists are all the
rage. If you fancy a night out at the cinema this week you can go and
see Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary ‘My Child Could Paint That’ about Marla
Olmstead. Marla is admittedly 8 now, but, after a career that raked in
around $300,000, her best work may be behind her.
Most of the coverage of the child artists has focused on the madness
of the modern art world, or the possibility of fraud. Bar-Lev’s
documentary apparently uses the decline in Olmstead’s work to suggest
that her father may have mocked up the earlier paintings in her name
for a quick buck. But I’m not so sure. I think we can take these
paintings seriously, and that’s why I think you should give me lots of
money for my niece’s pot.
I concede, if you were looking for a realistic picture of a tree or a
house, neither Freddie Linsky nor my niece is going to be much help to
you. And if you think what matters in art is the explanation on the
piece of card stuck next to the work, proud uncles and mothers who
work as art lecturers are going to have to keep conjuring them up on
behalf of their diminutive clients.
But we have spent decades developing the idea that art does not have
to be figurative or straightforwardly descriptive, and that the artistic
process may be as important as the art object produced. The path has
been opened for purely intuitive artists—on what grounds should we
deny ourselves the pleasure of their work?
Arguably, the action painting is the natural medium of the child artist.
When Isabella was painting this flowerpot, I stupidly asked her “What is
it?”
She looked at me, witheringly, “It’s a painting”.
“It’s a painting”. Isabella is an artist in the Pollock mould: art inheres in
the act of painting; it has nothing to do with artificial conventions of
representation. She knows that she is making a painting, and she knows
when it is finished. By any reasonable standard, this makes her the
creator of a work that can then be judged on its merits.
And when it comes to abstract expressionism, why shouldn’t the very
young have the edge? They feel intensely – you should hear her scream
when denied ‘Fifi and the Flowertots’ – and they lack the shackling
assumptions of experience. Oliver Sacks, in his new book ‘Musicophilia’
discusses the possibility that many of us possess savant-like talents at
birth: “the mechanism for such skills might reside in all of us in early life
but […] as the brain matures, they are inhibited”. So Marla Olmstead’s
brain may have already begun the long process of checking its gifts in
preparation for maturity. Perhaps Baudelaire was right that “Genius is
merely childhood recollected at will”.
In sum, not only does this flowerpot deserve your consideration, but
the artist has a strictly limited time in which to supply more. Come back
in six months and we’ll be stuck with bright green grass and splodgy
yellow suns. For now, there is a window of extraordinary talent, the
talent we all had before we grew up and got boring.
Buy while you still can. After Christmas, it’s going on ebay.
for Sale
Your child could paint that? So could my niece
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
The artist speaks only through her work. Her expressive
brushstrokes interrogate rather than resolve her
inner world, exploding onto unconventional drawing
surfaces in order to challenge the fixed forms imposed
by gallery convention. Here, a white plant pot in the
shape of a truncated cone and containing a miniature
Christmas tree provides a comment on the circularity
of time and a potent critique of banal seasonal
imagery. Offers in the region of £15,000 considered.
Now I freely admit that the artist is my two-year-old
niece, and I just made up that entire blurb. But I’m
still holding out for the money. After all, she’d only be
joining a trend. “Fingers” Freddie Linsky is the same
age and he exhibits on Saatchi Online and has been
offered an exhibition in Berlin. It seems that child artists are all the
rage. If you fancy a night out at the cinema this week you can go and
see Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary ‘My Child Could Paint That’ about Marla
Olmstead. Marla is admittedly 8 now, but, after a career that raked in
around $300,000, her best work may be behind her.
Most of the coverage of the child artists has focused on the madness
of the modern art world, or the possibility of fraud. Bar-Lev’s
documentary apparently uses the decline in Olmstead’s work to suggest
that her father may have mocked up the earlier paintings in her name
for a quick buck. But I’m not so sure. I think we can take these
paintings seriously, and that’s why I think you should give me lots of
money for my niece’s pot.
I concede, if you were looking for a realistic picture of a tree or a
house, neither Freddie Linsky nor my niece is going to be much help to
you. And if you think what matters in art is the explanation on the
piece of card stuck next to the work, proud uncles and mothers who
work as art lecturers are going to have to keep conjuring them up on
behalf of their diminutive clients.
But we have spent decades developing the idea that art does not have
to be figurative or straightforwardly descriptive, and that the artistic
process may be as important as the art object produced. The path has
been opened for purely intuitive artists—on what grounds should we
deny ourselves the pleasure of their work?
Arguably, the action painting is the natural medium of the child artist.
When Isabella was painting this flowerpot, I stupidly asked her “What is
it?”
She looked at me, witheringly, “It’s a painting”.
“It’s a painting”. Isabella is an artist in the Pollock mould: art inheres in
the act of painting; it has nothing to do with artificial conventions of
representation. She knows that she is making a painting, and she knows
when it is finished. By any reasonable standard, this makes her the
creator of a work that can then be judged on its merits.
And when it comes to abstract expressionism, why shouldn’t the very
young have the edge? They feel intensely – you should hear her scream
when denied ‘Fifi and the Flowertots’ – and they lack the shackling
assumptions of experience. Oliver Sacks, in his new book ‘Musicophilia’
discusses the possibility that many of us possess savant-like talents at
birth: “the mechanism for such skills might reside in all of us in early life
but […] as the brain matures, they are inhibited”. So Marla Olmstead’s
brain may have already begun the long process of checking its gifts in
preparation for maturity. Perhaps Baudelaire was right that “Genius is
merely childhood recollected at will”.
In sum, not only does this flowerpot deserve your consideration, but
the artist has a strictly limited time in which to supply more. Come back
in six months and we’ll be stuck with bright green grass and splodgy
yellow suns. For now, there is a window of extraordinary talent, the
talent we all had before we grew up and got boring.
Buy while you still can. After Christmas, it’s going on ebay.
| Marc Sidwell is not joking |
© lizardmagazine.com, 2007
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