CHILD ARTIST
More than 60 paintings sold.
Gerald Hushlak, a professor of painting at the University of Calgary, has studied the work of emerging artist Cosette Swart. There is an uncanny similarity to other abstract painters, he notes, and some technical proficiency — it’s inconsistent, but the use of colour, rhythm and movement seems to be there.
Mr. Hushlak, however, struggles to say whether the paintings are good: it presents an almost philosophical problem.
Is a four-year-old capable of consciously trying to communicate in that rarefied aesthetic language? Or is he projecting his one meaning onto her work in the same way a daydreamer finds shape in a cloud?
“Some of it is interesting,” he said. “I would be remiss if I said we have a genius here. Sometimes you put paint down. Sometimes it happens to be interesting.”
Cosette Swart, surveying a visitor with big, wary blue eyes, is suffering from a rare and sudden fit of shyness. She will only whisper to her mother, or play absently with her paintbrushes and a roll of Scotch Tape.
On the kitchen table sit four acrylic-on-canvas paintings, rich with colour, movement and texture. Abstract, sure — they don’t depict any objective thing. But the vibrant images do have a certain haunting beauty to them.
“She doesn’t have to do it,’’ Darryl Swart, a music producer, says of his daughter’s art career. ‘‘We always ask her: ‘Do you want to paint today?’ and if she says yes, we’ll set it up.”
Cosette’s art studio is her parents’ sunny kitchen in their southwest Calgary home. It’s quite the production, as anyone who has supervised a toddler paint party can attest: plastic protects the floor, the easel is set up. Cosette requires all her paints to be made available before she begins.
“The only thing is that we try to maintain the focus. She wants all the colours out all the time, so if she says after two minutes ‘I’m done,’ we try to encourage her,” her father said.
Her mother, Kristy-Anne Swart, a photographer, said they also try to buoy her work ethic if a portrait appears a little under-done.
‘‘We’re both artists so I think this has just been in the fabric of our family, to always be doing music and art. When she started doing these paintings, straight away I thought they were really good. I liked them. I thought they were better than the adult abstract artists who were trying to make it work,” she said.
She acknowledges Cosette’s artistic success may raise questions about either her daughter’s latent genius, or of the objective quality of modern art.
“There is something pure about a child who is not think- ing too hard, and can just feel it rather than thinking about it,” she said. “Sometimes she’ll paint with her feet. Sometimes she’ll paint with a brush in her mouth, or two brushes at once. It was just fun to see her explore.”
Of late, Cosette has taken to spreading paint around her canvas using a plastic fork.
More than 60 of these pictures have sold, for as little as $15 and as much $275 a pop. The Swart family can’t pro- duce the images fast enough; as soon as a painting is posted online, it is sold.
The art has generated almost $4,000 for charity in a year.
Cosette’s artistic forays began when she was 3. She started paying attention to the plight of disadvantaged children in Africa and was moved to help the “poor people.”
The family looked at the World Vision Gift Catalogue, and decided to raise money to buy a family a cow. But how?
‘‘At the same time, we started looking at her paintings and we were seeing that they were turning out really nice,” Ms. Swart said. They thought friends and family might humour them with a few hundred dollars for Cosette’s paintings.
But before long, emails were pouring in from all over the world, and the family (Cosette has a toddler brother) set up a website.
“I’d sell pieces to try and raise money for the cow and it just kind of blew up with friends on social media, people all wanting them, and we haven’t been able to keep up with the demand,” Mrs. Swart said.
Dick Averns, an instructor at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, says it’s difficult to objectively critique a child.
“Looking at the work, I think there are things that are important to point out that are valid. The work is imbued with a sense of freedom, it represents a sense of innocence. It looks very fresh, and it’s certainly playful. That’s something most people actually look for in their life,” he said. “Children are really adept at presenting an unbridled creativity, sometimes.”
One of the metrics by which critics will judge a piece of art is by how much it sells for — certainly Cosette has had better luck on that front than many adult emerging artists.
“You can’ t say whether something is objectively good against a [four]-year-old. I don’t think that’s a fair thing to do, but I don’t think the work is bad,” he said.
Erin O’Connor, managing director of the Contemporary Calgary gallery, noted ‘‘the honest art of a four-year-old has a super-high feel-good factor,” she said. For a relat i vely small investment, purchasers obtain a “fresh, unique piece of contemporary art that has a great story behind it.”
Mr. Hushlak is somewhat more skeptical. Artists have measures by which they judge their work, and those measures have to rely on a baseline understanding of aesthetic rules and principles.
“We don’t know whether it’s good art,” he said. “It has to address a particular knowledge base.” But then again. “I’m not sure I’m right there,” he said. “Sometimes things just feel right.”
The work is imbued with a sense of freedom ... of innocence