Monday 14th June 2021 – Moorings

2021 Attracchi 143x90cm olio su tela

A few weeks ago I held a workshop in a primary school on this theme of moorings.
The idea of the art teacher was to leave a positive message to the two fifth classes (53 children in all) for the end of the school year. It was a really intense and fascinating moment!
During the first part of the morning I painted a picture in front of them and I told how these recent works on the moorings were born. In the second part of the morning the protagonists were the children: each one had a canvas like a true painter and they made 53 canvases on the theme of docks, one more intense than the other.
In the end I briefly commented on the painting of each of them, one by one. When I arrived in front of her painting, a little girl exclaimed: “You can’t really tell me this is beautiful, I don’t believe it!”
I stopped for a moment, looked at it and told her first of all that it happens to me many times to make mistakes, but that you are not determined by the mistake. And then, I told her, beauty is not just a question of external perfection of what you do or produce: beauty is inside who you are, it is already inside you.
Seeing all the works together really struck me a lot, you can find below a selection of images: the simplicity of children is unattainable, and Picasso was right when he said that it took him a lifetime to learn to paint as a child.
Yes, because in them there is that spontaneity of entering into a relationship with the surface of the canvas in a very direct way, without filters. I had tried to do some painting that particularly impressed me, but with poor results.

In the painting of this Monday there is only one mooring, inside the yellow and green water, while the ropes that make the crossing are more. The pole is the element that gives composure and firmness to the picture, and I really wish these children who have finished primary school to remain attached, clinging as much as they can, to what really fills their deepest desires.
Happy Monday and good week to all!