30 Dec 2012

There Are Six Year Olds Who Can Draw Better Than You

I'm in an art gallery right now. Like, literally, as I'm writing this. I've gone old fashioned and acquired a notepad and a half chewed Biro (the Biro wasn't half chewed when I bought it, just when I fished it out of the bottom of my hand bag.) I'm meant to be watching a scree, which is showing video clips of Sheffield and the surrounding area, but if I'm honest, it's really just a video of some damp trees. I'm just taking advantage of the bench space. Also, I'm listening to Adele, and she doesn't really fit with pictures of rainy council estates (would it have killed them to do some filming when it was sunny?) 
Since I've sat down, everyone else who was watching the screen has left. I can't tell if this is because the film is really boring  or because I look a bit like a really annoying art student, who may want to engage them in conversation about 'how the piece makes them feel'. The sort that takes black and white photos with cameras bigger than their heads, and sit in coffee shops discussing the methods of oil painting, and how they prefer digital art (ugh.) 
Art students are currently making up a surprisingly small percentage of the people in here. They're probably over the road at the potato print exhibition. This exhibition is full of charcoal sketches of weather, and a large, multi-coloured tent. Most people in here look like rather lost hikers, who have tried going for a walk, and accidently fallen into a painting of the hill they were meant to be up. It's a mixture of them, and middle class mothers, desperately trying to expose their pre-school children to culture. The children couldn't care less. They're more interested in the fact that they can do a little drawing and stick it up on the public display board. So am I. I just did a landscape sketch of Camelot, from Monty Pythons 'Quest For The Holy Grail'.  It was awful. I still stuck it up on the wall. I captioned it 'It is a silly place'. You're welcome.
There are three types of picture up on the wall, each (roughly) as awful as the next. There are the ones done by bored three year olds, who have desperately attempted to do a professionalism water colour of a mountain side, covered in trees. Then, there are the neat little drawings of perfectly shaded fur trees, done by grown up, who were probably just try to show off in front of a date. Finally, there are the worst ones; stick men captioned "By Ben age 17" or "By Clara, aged 17". No. You are not being funny by pretending to do a child's drawing. It's just annoying. And probably quite offensive to the children. Theirs are much better.

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