I’ll admit I felt quite vindicated when I read of a new study this week that found that babies like Van Gogh. It seems he’s as popular with the under-ones as he is with adults, or, more accurately: the adult preference for his work is mirrored in babies, suggesting certain biases in what we choose to look at are already present in infancy and carry over into adulthood. When choosing art for the baby’s room, I looked at work created for that purpose, and almost all of it was saccharine and of poor quality. So I decided on fine art instead. I thought for a long time about which images to choose, wanting something that reflected what I thought he would enjoy, rather than my own specific taste. In the end I opted for The Starry Night, feeling instinctively that he would appreciate its mesmeric swirls as he drifts off to sleep.
The other two I chose were the brightest Jackson Pollock that I could find, and a pleasingly exuberant landscape by David Hockney. (It hardly needs explaining that these are posters that I am talking about. Were they actual originals, I would be writing this from my villa in the Luberon.) Before you pull me up on the lack of representation of female artists, I keep meaning to move the Lee Krasner in the hall in there, and I felt Georgia O’Keeffe was too vaginal, though I suppose babies should sometimes be reminded of where they are from (“She always rejected that interpretation of her work,” I said to my husband, when he remarked upon the print in the bathroom. “Be real,” he said, “It’s a vag”). And so the only female artist represented is my mother, Anna, with her beautiful painting of the bay at Naoussa, Paros. It turns out that this was a good choice, too, as the study found that infants gaze longer at stretches of sky.
I can’t imagine living my life without art, or remember a time when I haven’t enjoyed looking at it or making it. Children are natural artists, lacking the self-consciousness of adults in their desire for self-expression. It is such a human impulse, to make a mark. It is why I find the phrase “My five-year-old could have done that” so tedious, and the book Why Your Five Year Old Could Not Have Done That: Modern Art Explained so inspired in its title. Children may lack the critical thought and talent of well-trained adult artists, but their playfulness, sense of imagination and humour are qualities that the adult artist retains, and can make their work captivating. I occasionally see grownups mocking their children’s pictures and their lack of figurative resemblance to their subjects in a way that comes across as superior and occasionally cruel. It’s OK to have a giggle occasionally, of course, but if you respond negatively to your child’s work enough times they will stop making it. Besides, how utterly passé to view an ability to create a true likeness of the world as the only measure of artistic quality.
Of course, you can go too far the other way. My mother kept bags and bags of my childhood finger paintings, which she then tried to pass on to me in my early 20s. Funnily enough I didn’t feel as sentimental about this juvenilia as she did, and there ensued a brutal cull. I may joke, but actually I strongly suspect that her ceaseless support of my creative work has given me the inner confidence to lead the life of a writer in adulthood, not to mention validated that crucial impulse, crushed out of so many of us, to make tangible the ideas in your mind.
Just look at the Young Artists’ Summer Show, either in person at the Royal Academy or via the virtual exhibition online. The imagination on display, the humour. Where else could you see a crisp sandwich, a cat made of clouds, a narwhal that can communicate with the dead, a boy’s baby sister, an abstract interpretation of the Lake District, and a portrait of Richard Ayoade? One of my favourite pictures, by Nico, aged seven, bears the legend: I DON’T WANT TO ENTER THE ROYAL ACADEMY ART COMPETITION and shows a magnificent use of colour and a small, very funny grumpy face. Nico’s witty rejection of the mainstream art establishment shows great promise in terms of a future career.
What I love the most when I look at these paintings is how happy they make me feel. Art can be pain, of course – without the latter we could not have the former – but it can also be joy. Unfortunately we are in a political climate where the appreciation and creation of art is so often dismissed as pretentious or navel-gazing, and creative subjects are deemed useless. Which is why we so desperately need that joy, and should try to recapture as much of it as we can for ourselves.
There’s a video of my boy, only a few weeks old, gazing in amazement at the black and white outlines of a Keith Haring picture printed on to a “sensory strip” (made by the company Etta Loves especially for newborns). The way his face changed as he absorbed the shapes: it still amazes me now. Van Gogh, I believe, understood this, which is why in a letter to his younger brother he wrote about the godlike nature of the child’s gaze: “I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle. If there is a ‘ray from on high’, perhaps one can find it there.”
What’s working
On the Night You Were Born, by Nancy Tillman, is one of the baby’s favourite books, and I adore it, but it wasn’t until recently that I could get to the end without stifling a sob. On discovering that she has a new one out, Because You’re Mine, I was struck by this Amazon review: “Gorgeous illustrations as always. The only problem is I can’t get to the end without crying.” A children’s author of rare talent.
What’s not
Whatever bit of code that links up episodes of shows on iPlayer so that you can put a very poorly baby in front of some nursery rhymes or episodes of Postman Pat without having to pick up the remote every five minutes is on the blink again. In the name of God, please fix it.
• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
