Today has been a really good day. For the first time since March we were able to get together with one of my sons and his family. We have spoken on the ‘phone, of course, and have developed the habit of Zoom encounters, but it isn’t the same as a day spent together at home. I was gratified particularly by our grandson’s enquiry as soon as he walked into the house, about where we had done the painting on previous. visits. So, after lunch the two of us headed off into the studio and a got out a set of oil pastels.
We soon settled on a shared subject. Each of us was to draw something about roads, and the project quickly became more focussed as we free-associated about the theme. It had to be desert roads. His imagination ran riot as his road passed an anaconda. My knowledge of wildlife is not the greatest but it did seem somehow out of place among all those cacti. I was content with the more prosaic but possibly more accurate rattle snake.
Pride, of course, came before the inevitable fall. When it came to giving our work titles I settled pretty quickly on Highway 61–in honour of Bob Dylan, as you will have guessed. It was only after we had taken our pieces to show to the rest of the family that I realised that Highway 61 doesn’t run across the desert, but takes a north-south course well to the east of any desert landscape. My son (whose work takes him regularly to the USA) spotted immediately an even more embarrassing error. In the United States it is usual to drive on the right, and not on the left, as in the UK. Ah well!
I did discover something more important during the session than my relative ignorance of the USA. The experience was playful. We played with our art. I overlook that possibility far too frequently. Being an artist is taken so very seriously. Too often we loose sight of the celebrated insistence of the Dutch historian John Huizinga, that play is an essential characteristic of the human species. His Homo Ludens defines our species in terms of our capacity for play. Art is very closely aligned to that aspect of our nature. Having run out of projects at the moment it would seem to be a good time for me to stop trying quite so hard to be “an artist”, and to play much more.
Incidentally, I have become convinced recently that Huizinga got his emphasis wrong. Although the capacity for play is indeed an important attribute of human beings, I keep encountering examples of other species also able to be simply playful. Rather than separating us from the rest of the natural world play actually underlines our common heritage.