Painting by Numbers

Let's talk about art.

My favourite form when I was young was potato printing.

This came to my mind yesterday when Joanne, a co-worker, tapped into my 5 decades of life experience to enquire about ways of keeping her 1 year old occupied on her forthcoming day off. I do have some good ideas in that sector of early years education and entertainment. I have the scars, paint splattered clothes and a number of large storage boxes of archived works of art in the attic to prove it. Seen it, done it, spoiled the 'T' shirt.

Little Alfie is well ahead of his peers in his development and as I know from my own three children, when at that age, they must be encouraged and nurtured to bring on their skills, talents and natural aptitudes. Oh, and they must have excellent fun and be excused any collateral damage to furniture, carpets, doors, wall finishes and domestic pets.

My own formative years were surrounded by an abundance of paper, pencils, crayons, chalks, felt tips, paints and ink. An old biscuit tin in the room assigned as the playroom for the five of us siblings was full to the brim with means to express ourselves and every Christmas we would receive a huge pack, each, of brightly coloured felt tip pens, fifty or so in number and with the appearance of a pastel shaded rainbow.

It was always a shame to rip open the carefully packaged collection and within a few days large gaps would appear in the grooves of the moulded plastic tray as individual pens were depleted from use and discarded, had been allowed to dry up, the end cap had been chewed remorselessly between meals or items had rolled off the playroom table and under the piano or down the sides of the loose cushion best room sofa.

We could never complain about a shortage of materials. It must have been the early days of spreadsheet computing at Father's place of work because much of our scrap paper was in very long lengths, faintly striped, perforated at the edges and in manageable, for small hands, tear off sections. Any printed material on the front was gobbledygook as we were only after the bright white reverse side on which to wreak our artistic havoc.

Back to the medium of potato printing.

Joanne was intrigued by the whole concept. Take a raw potato, ideally one of the green, uglier ones in the bag which you would hesitate to eat, cut it in half so as to leave enough to comfortably hold. Take a sharp knife and, here ask a grown up, carefully cut away the edges to form a shape. Stars, irregular, are good but probably best to start off with a square or rectangle first. As confidence grows there is no limit to potential shapes, crescent moon, circle, triangle or to the extent of something I was never able to achieve- the intial letter of my Christian name. Just a moment whilst I go to the vegetable drawer in the fridge.............bit past the sell by date that one, if I cut off the growths and dig out that mouldy part.....knife, no grown up available, well, here goes....put tongue back in mouth...nope. Still can't carve a 'P'.

Armed with at least one potato printing block out of a full 5kg bag of King Edwards it is time to approach the creative stage.

Poster paints were plentiful in my childhood but being ready made and usually in small glass jars they were not well suited to being dipped in by a large potato wedge. More fun and mess was generated by prising open the large tubs of powder paints and using the best silver spoons from our parents wedding canteen of cutlery in trying to estimate the quantities of paint to tap water required for the perfect consistency.

Of course, the delivery of the water to the playroom table had to be in the tallest, most unstable container to be found in the kitchen. Inevitably the spillage of water and the explosion of dry paint powder from its hermetically sealed cylinder made the table top itself a huge mixing palate.

Potato printing would be immediately sidelined in favour of just putting our hands directly into the mixture and pressing the sticky palms onto not just the positioned paper but just about every other surface between playroom, kitchen snack cupboard, toilet, front door if the bell rang, telephone and the clunky buttons on the old valve operated TV.

Mother kept the twin tub washing machine on perpetual stand-by when our creative urges started to show.

I now realise why, at childrens bath-time following a session in our own art studio/playroom  we were surrounded not by the froth of bubble bath but various hues of bright colours, in suspension in the water, from ultramarine blue with a tint of organic vermillion, to cobalt violet and phthalo emerald. We generally ignored anything else in the water, especially brown things that floated.