Grandparenting: when Matilda gave me an art lesson

On my latest visit to her house, there came a moment when Matilda, my five-year-old granddaughter, thrust an etch-a-sketch at me and said, ‘what should I draw?’

Like an idiot, I said, ‘a horse’.

The look she gave me conveyed many things, but enthusiasm wasn’t one of them.

My suggestion had been obviously crazy. Far too difficult. Nervously I racked my mind for some easier alternative.

‘What about a house?’

Odd, isn’t it? Change one letter and a challenging drawing option turns into an elementary one. I always find that kind of linguistic oddity amusing.

‘A house?’ said Matilda, now with a smile. And got drawing.

What I was expecting was a box with the top split to form something like a roof, two windows as though they were eyes and a tall rectangle as a door, in the position of a mouth. Or possibly a nose. To complete the picture, there might be a chimney at the top with a spiral of smoke coming out of it.

A House. As one might expect a five-year-old to draw it

What I got was different.

A House. As Etch-a-Sketched by Matilda

Not everybody agrees on what we’re looking at here.

Matilda’s uncle, my middle son Michael, assures me that what I see as a bed inside the house is in fact a pair of steps leading to a door. That strikes me as far-fetched. Or should I say far-sketched?

Matilda’s grandmother Danielle agrees with me that it’s a bed, with a pillow at one end and someone’s head lying on it. However Danielle qualifies her view: ‘but it would be a cut-off head’.

It’s true that the head looks a bit bodiless. It may well be this apparent decapitation that led to Matilda herself being dissatisfied with the picture. ‘My drawing’s bad,’ she assured me, before deleting it. A deletion which suggests that she hadn’t spotted me making a more permanent record of it on my phone.

Why did I take a photograph of her drawing? 

Because I was impressed that, the way I interpret it, what she’d chosen to show was something from inside the house rather than a dull exterior. She’d presented the life within and not just the structure without. In other words, more than a house, she’d drawn a home.

I think that’s impressive.

Obviously, I could check out whether she agrees with my interpretation. ‘You could always ask her what she drew,’ Michael urges me. 

He’s right, of course. But I’m not sure she’d tell me. And I’m not sure I want to know anyway. I rather like the uncertainty. Is it just a door? Is it a decapitated individual in a bed? Or is it just someone lying down to rest from the stress of outside life?

I don’t know and I like it that way. It means we can choose our own interpretation. And that strikes me as the richness of art.

Postscript

Talking about art, here’s another Matilda story.

The most celebrated painter from Valencia, where we now live, is Joaquín Sorolla. Why, the main station, to which I’m heading today after my visit to Matilda and Elliott, is even called after him. No year seems to go by without some new Sorolla exhibition in the city, if not two or three, and the top floor of the  Museum of Fine Arts is dedicated to Sorolla and his contemporaries.

Among the paintings by Sorolla’s contemporaries on show is one that always gets me smiling. It’s called La Mosca, The Fly, and it was painted in 1897 by the artist Cecilio Pla. A commentator I’ve read calls the smile in the painting ‘contagious’, which is just how it feels to me. 

La Mosca by Cecilio Pla

I find the work playful, humorous, and quite simply fun.

Now in Matilda’s parents’ kitchen the curtains, though I suspect of a slightly less expensive fabric than in the house of a late nineteenth-century upper-middle-class family, nonetheless make me think of the painting. So for a while now I’ve been trying to get Matilda to emulate the whimsical pose of the painting in her own kitchen. On this visit, I was finally able to do so. 

The result was at least as playful, humorous and fun as Pla’s piece. Though with a distinctively Matilda touch to it. Apparently, it didn’t occur to Pla to have his model stick out her tongue – that was all Matilda. 

But, hey, doesn’t that just make it all the more playful?

Matilda as La Mosca, by me

Coronavirus lockdown release: phase 2 cotinued

We continue our slow climb out of lockdown here in Spain. It’s a relief, but tinged with anxiety, since there are signs of an increase in infections, and in daily deaths, as the restrictions are lifted.

The other uptick is in Opposition attacks on Government over its handling of the infection in the early stages. The Opposition claims that the government knew a lot earlier about the seriousness of the crisis than it has admitted, making its failure to take action sooner intolerable to the Conservatives.

Personally, I like the administration led by Pedro Sánchez and his Socialist Party. Its handling of the crisis since that early stage has been outstanding. However, I suppose as a supporter of democratic process, I can hardly object to an Opposition holding Government to account for its earlier errors, however much I may prefer the latter to the former.

Otherwise, how could I possibly demand that the Labour Opposition in Britain hold the Cummings government, and its figurehead leader Johnson, to account there? That’s a demand that needs to be made all the more strongly, now that Britain has officially racked up a performance worse than Spain’s, in deaths per million, despite having had the examples of both Italy and Spain to learn from.

At least in Spain we’re continuing to emerge from lockdown. Now, it may not last if infections keep climbing. So we’re taking advantage of freedom today, for fear that it might be curtailed by a new lockdown tomorrow. That means doing as much as possible, as soon as possible.

Museo de las Bellas Artes, Valencia

For instance, after having our first haircuts in three months, we headed for the Valencia Museum of Fine Arts, now visitable again. That’s an opportunity that hadn’t been taken up by many, so we met only one other visitor during our time there.

I’ve been there a couple of times before. However, I realised on this visit that I’d seen only a small fraction of the collection. That’s because previously I started, as one might expect, on the ground floor, which is just room after room of religious art from the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Obviously, many people whose opinions I respect love this stuff. I’m afraid I quickly find I’ve had a surfeit of nativities, even more quickly of Mary weeping over Christ’s body, most quickly of all over martyrdoms, flagellations of Christ and crucifixions. In fact, three or four pin-cushion Saint Sebastians are usually about as many as I can stand before I head for the exit.

Why on Earth, in a religion like Christianity, focused as it’s supposed to be on loving one’s neighbour and turning the other cheek, are so many of its followers quite so obsessed with suffering, torture and death?

Still, there were a couple of paintings in this part of the Museum that I enjoyed.

Saint Sebastian cared for by Saint Irene
by Vrancke van der Stockt

I liked a Saint Sebastian who, far from being a pin cushion, seemed to be dying – or, more likely, already dead, given the shock and grief of Saint Irene who was looking after him – from a single arrow wound. A tribute, I felt, to the lethal power of even one arrow. No tribute at all, though, to the shooting accuracy of the Roman legion, a whole execution squad of which had been assigned to dealing with him. Did the rest all miss, then?

Adam and Eve by Matthias Stom

The other one I liked was of a strangely stylised – almost surreal – painting of Adam and Eve holding a fruit, oddly elongated upwards. I wondered whether the artist was perhaps a member of a strange heretical sect of which I hadn’t previously heard, which believed that the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree from which they weren’t supposed to eat, was a pear and not an apple?

Was it a pear they tasted?

Look at it. It’s obviously a pear.

Incidentally, while on the subject I can’t resist passing on this thought from the outstanding eighteenth century thinker, Denis Diderot, who commented that the Christian God is a father who attaches great importance to his apples, and very little to his children.

But back to the Museum of Fine Arts. For the first time in three visits, rather than giving up and leaving after having a glut of the religious paintings, I let myself be persuaded by Danielle to take a look at the other floors. And what a joy that was. On the upper floors, I discovered the collections of more recent paintings, that were far more to my taste.

Perhaps the most famous painter from Valencia is Joaquín Sorolla. Why, the main station in the city is even called after him. And the Museum has some excellent examples of his work. One, I thought at first glance was of a cricketer, given his all-white clothes.

Sorolla's painting of a cricketer?
Not, the son of a friend

But cricket has never really caught on in Spain, and this turns out to be a rather eye-catching portrait of José Luis Benlliure López de Arana, son of Sorolla’s friend, the sculptor Mariano Benlliure.

The Fly
A charming surprise to discover it

Even more striking was a painting by a contemporary of Sorolla’s, Cecilio Plá. It’s called The Fly and includes a smile that charms by its cheekiness, within a pose that mystifies by the way it reveals all the more by being partially hidden.

So, all in all, it was a rewarding visit. What can I saw about Phase 2 of our lockdown release? Just ‘so far, so good’.

Of course, that’s what the man said as he passed the 52nd floor of the Empire State Building, having fallen from the top. Let’s hope we’re heading towards a better fate than awaited him.