‘I was a little boy and I didn’t know what to expect. It was my mother’s idea – that year for her birthday she wanted us all to go somewhere different. It turned out to be a day that changed my life forever.’
A family reluctantly visits an art gallery but one by one each member is energized by a different picture in the gallery and transported into the imaginative and colourful world of art.
Here are some of the paintings they look at in the Tate Gallery:
Augustus Leopold Egg, Past and Present, No.1 1858
Seventeenth century British School, The Cholmondeley Ladies c.1600 - 1610
John Singleton Copley, The Death of Major Peirson, 1781
John Everett Millais, The Boyhood of Raleigh, 1870
It’s one of the things that’s great to see happen with a group of kids, watch them become absorbed in a picture they sit down in front of, start to see all sorts of things in it, listen to each others ideas, ask questions…
I briefly mentioned writer / illustrator, children’s laureate, Anthony Browne before. We were having a look at some of his classics today:
Gorilla, the tale of a girl with a much too busy dad, who is swung off to the zoo and thte cinema by a gorrila.
The tunnel where a brother and sister who don’t like each other, come face to face after crawling through a mysterious tunnel.
A walk in the park, where two small families pass in the park. The dogs play first, then the children, but the parents never ignore each other.
All touch imaginatively on neglect, silence when words should be spoken, even hostility. For a while, years ago, I felt uneasy with them. Now I’m pleased they have such a strong flavour, that they are a kind of challenge to adults and kids alike, while being beautiful and interesting and many-facetted quite apart from the challenge;
A game he talks a lot about when he meets children is ‘the Shape Game’. As a child he played it with his brother and he later turned it into a book of the same name, following his experiences as Illustrator in Residence at the Tate Gallery.
‘I play the Shape Game with children because they start to believe they can’t draw. But they can naturally, instinctively draw. Drawing is about communicating. It is not about producing perfect representation, but about communicating ideas, and the Shape Game encourages that.
‘It is a simple but fun game. Ultimately, it is the essence of creativity, because every time we create a picture, write a story, compose a piece of music, or we have taken something that we have seen, heard or read, we have transformed it into our interpretation, something of our own.
‘It may be that at the same time that children start to say “I can’t draw”, they are pushing away the picture book. We don’t value looking. I think we are quite a visually illiterate nation.’
“Picture books are special. They are not like anything else. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures — a gap that is filled by the reader’s imagination.”
“These are not books to be left behind as we grow older. I would like to encourage the act of looking. I would like to encourage children and adults to learn the Shape Game.”
Sam in between books, time for a picture book, The Shape Game by Anthony Browne (mentioned before).
2 
3 
4 
5 
6 
7 
8 
9 
10 
11 
12 
