The relative artistic merits of Lowry and Emberley.

I can’t remember why, but the other night we got caught talking about Lowry at the dinner table. I think it had something to do with happening to start talking about how we all have our own preferences of artistic expression. Maddy said she liked to do black and white because colouring covered up her ideas and she prefers to see what is going on in her pictures, while Fran said she preferred to colour. I have no artisitic abilities with a pen at all, but can express myself acceptably in clay. Maddy does do very detailed little pictures, often with pop out boxes to show a close up of an area and there is always a lot going on. It is very rare for her to do a conventional picture, though when she does, it is lovely. Fran likes, as a rule, to draw fast and put lots of colour into things, mainly to fill up space fast i think. They are extremely different in style. Amelie seems to be a cross between them, detailed and colourful, while Josie is so far the only one to show any interest in “colouring” for its own sake. She likes to neatly colour in outlines and has a lovely, methodical style for it. Her pen control and concentration is far beyond what the other had for such things at 3.

I gave myself the day off today, because i really wanted to spend some time with them. They were busy last week and away at the weekend and i was busy the week before. We were ALL tired and grumpy this weekend and i had some things i simply HAD to do at the ofiice, which ate into my time. They normally spend some of Monday with Sue and LF but today seemed a good opportunity to just hunker down and do something different.

I printed off some Lowry pictures and we did a little bit about them, talking about the colours, subject matter, style etc I’m keen to do more of this but today i mostly just wanted fun, so fairly quickly we got out the pens and they just got going. Maddy did a village scene which i’ll have to find and photograph tomorrow and Fran started using some Ed Emberley art books that i bought ages ago thinking Maddy would like them. But she didn’t.

Fran however, adored them. They break everything into the SIMPLEST of ideas, really, REALLY simple, sticks, letters, dots and blocks and then you just go on from there. Rather than a good drawing that you end up not being able to replicate, these are stick men and stick houses, Lowry-esque and so almost anything you do will actually be an improvement. She had such fun and drew all day, making up stories in her head, writing in speech. It was great to see her enjoy it so much.

I read some of “Mill Girl” to them through this and then strewed bits of info about the industrial revolution at them… they bore it with remarkable fortitude 😆 Funnily enough, one of the things that seemed to improve their creativity, was a considerably lack of paper. They knew we hardly had any and so they seemed to cram far more on to the page.

I can’t find Maddy’s pic but here are bits of the rest.

And especially for Auntie Greer… who… and where?