EDEL MORGANtook her two sons to an art workshop at the Ark in Temple Bar where they learned how an artist makes the magic happen
THE 16 LITTLE “artists” in paint-smudged overalls filed into the exhibition space at the Ark cultural centre for children in Dublin’s Temple Bar to listen to a pep talk about the ways artists find inspiration and need their own space to work.
Animated and theatrical, as if talking to a lecture theatre full of eager art college students, artist Terry O’Farrell tells the group, the youngest of whom are barely out of toddlerhood, about how the “magic happens” for an artist, when they experiment with materials “touching, feeling, adding a bit of this, a bit of that”.
This is no run-of-the-mill summer project style art class where more paint ends up in the child’s hair than on the canvas. While they’re encouraged to have fun, the “artists”, as O’Farrell refers to the children who attend the 90-minute classes, are often greeted with a firm handshake, and are shown techniques using the best of artists’ materials, “because children do notice quality”.
Before they are unleashed on the work room, she tells them how some artists collect things that inspire them for their studio and how daydreaming is important for creativity. It’s not like school where you’re under pressure to finish things quickly, she tells them, and you’re in complete control of your masterpiece.
The theme of the summer workshops is family, but in the spirit of pushing boundaries, the children can draw anything they feel passionate about.
At the end of the class the budding artists can exhibit their work in an evolving exhibition which has been open to the public all summer and has its own curator. At first, I wondered how my sons Cal (5) and Theo (3) would fare because, to date, they haven’t mentioned anything about their artistic inspirations.
Theo, who was allowed in despite being a few months under the minimum age of four, does understand the concept of pushing boundaries, however, causing the staff a few anxious moments when he handled some of the clay exhibits made by children in previous workshops, and later bounced a balloon O’Farrell had given him around the gallery.
In the work room he hovered around a box of scissors with a glint in his eye and at one point swiped the contents and spread them all over his work table – albeit in a very Tracey Emin-ish kind of way. While previous workshops this summer have shown kids how to work in clay, paint, cloth and wire, this one was multimedia and they were being asked to make a double-sided collage or picture on perspex using wool, feathers, flowers, tinfoil, wire, beady things, handmade paper, scraps of fabric, coloured stones and twigs.
“Can I have a few minutes to think about it?” asked a little boy called Marty who told us that his uncle, who was with him, “is a painter and decorator”. O’Farrell told him to take his time and then demonstrated how to press sticky paper over the collage to hold it together. It didn’t matter that there was a feather sticking out over the edge of one of the pictures. “Artists can do that,” said O’Farrell.
Cal didn’t know what to draw and O’Farrell held an impromptu ideas session with him where he told her about the “real fire-breathing dragon” he’d seen in a cave in Disney and about Belle, our neighbour’s cat. He eventually settled on a more original, if less labour-intensive, concept – “the sky with legs”. “Wonderful, what imagination,” exclaimed O’Farrell. Theo, with some encouragement from the staff, managed to produce a two-dimensional collage in stone and cork of “a pebble beach with walls”.
“I want to be a tattoo artist,” said 13 “and three-quarter” year-old Kerrie, the eldest of the group, who had drawn a beautiful representation of her initials on a piece of paper. “No, actually,” she said, “I’d like to be a counsellor, listening to people and then be a tattoo artist in my spare time.”
Adam was making a plasticine volcano, like the one he’d seen “on Lambay Island” which “doesn’t work any more”. Seven-year-old Oisín drew a picture of himself coming home from a party holding balloons with his dog on a lead while his brother Rory aged five “and three quarters” did a sketch of Conkers, their pet hamster in his cage.
Alan, a nine-year-old who took O’Farrell at her word and decided to do his own thing and work in clay, said he loves art but his real ambition is to be a rock star – “go to Hollywood and cut a record deal”. A songwriter and talented rapper, he performed a spirited rendition of his rap about government corruption. He’s also written numbers about Barack Obama and Justin Bieber, the latter composed to annoy his twin sister, who is a Bieber fan.
Afterwards, the workshop curator Ashleigh Downey showed me the art works produced by children over the summer – the standard of which has to be seen to be believed – which she says are treated “with great respect”. Downey and O’Farrell work together to show each piece to its best advantage and Downey says some of the young artists had strong views about how they wanted their work displayed.
Picking up a portrait etched in clay by a very young child, Downey, who is also visual arts programmer at Ark, held it as if it was a priceless work. “It’s like a Picasso, isn’t it? It’s like something you’d see at Imma.”
The last visual arts workshop, for families, will take place on Sunday. The exhibition is free and is open tomorrow and Sunday, and next week from Wednesday to Saturday
