Make me a gold unicorn mummy. Now!
I don’t know how I do it Lorraine Candy
AS a child, i enjoyed art homework. i mean, what’s not to like? There is no right or wrong answer, you can spend as much or as little time on it as you want and even if you have the drawing skills of a short-sighted mountain goat, you can just claim your work is abstract.
as an adult, however, art homework is the hardest of all the subjects to tackle, and working as an unpaid assistant on school art projects has driven me to the outer edges of maternal sanity over the past decade.
This week’s infant school ‘make an Olympic mascot’ challenge was almost a glitter session too far.
i feel i am obliged to help all four of my children, aged five to 13, with art because Mr candy, the more logical parent, does the maths homework. But my children’s temperaments and artistic styles vary dramatically.
imagine assisting damien hirst, Tracey Emin, Vincent van Gogh and Purple Ronnie and you get the picture.
it requires a depth of patience even someone as calm and saintly as Mary Berry would struggle to employ.
The ability not to explode with rage and demand to be sectioned while fashioning a lastminute globe out of papier mâché, using only a lolly stick and a vastly inadequate supply of blue paint, is one of the toughest tests of motherhood. You should definitely try it before you contemplate pregnancy for the first time.
This week it went something like this with our five-year-old:
‘i want my Olympic mascot to be called Simon and to be a silver unicorn. i want to draw it and i want it to come alive like the unicorns at the zoo.’
Me: ‘There are no unicorns at the zoo.’
Mabel: ‘Yes there are, we saw them.’
This goes on for ten minutes until, under time pressure, i agree to go and see the unicorns again on Saturday.
Mabel: ‘What are you doing? i don’t want silver paint, i want gold. i told you. and it has to have two horns and stand up, not be on paper. i am going to watch Peppa Pig.’
Mabel disappears and i start cutting up egg boxes angrily and wonder if we are listed as a major investor in Pritt Stick’s annual financial report. i note we have only half a small pot of gold paint for what has been optimistically labelled ‘Golda the mascot’.
Mabel returns: ‘What is that forgoodnessnakes?’
Me, through gritted teeth, looking as crazed as a Jackson Pollock painting: ‘a nearly-gold unicorn with two horns?’
‘it’s not what i had hoped,’ she says, critically, before adding three purple star earrings and signing it in the manner of Picasso.
and that is the crux of the problem with art homework: time is always against you and, apart from our life-size skeleton made out of cardboard, which should have won the Turner prize, almost all of it is an anticlimax because the end result is always some way off what was imagined.
it is yet another thing that niggles at you when you worry about being a failure as a mum. Expectations are always too high and, in fact, i now dread the words ‘art homework’ more than i dread the words ‘World Book day costume’.
i hate to see my children so disappointed, especially when they (well, we) put in so much work. Gracie-in-the-middle once spent a week crafting a matchstick water mill, but it broke her heart when it fell apart on first use.
Unless you live with a Blue Peter presenter, you are always working with tools that are not fit for purpose.
a jumbled drawer of blunt scissors and dried-out pens, combined with the limited imagination of the tired mind of a sleep-deprived parent, does not an artist make.
and you tread a fine line between helping and doing when it comes to art, but the last minute nature of homework often requires adult intervention to get it finished. i am still particularly proud of my Pirate cat Shark pop-up book.
as we carried Golda carefully to infant school, i noticed extreme levels of parental involvement on display, with some near-perfect mascots.
i could see people glancing at ours and wondering what kind of genetic experiment would produce such a mutant — then i realised i was sitting on a goldmine.
What if i were to set up a business doing everyone’s art homework? Our unique selling point would be we make art so ridiculous it looks exactly as if a child has made it! i feel a dragons’ den pitch coming on. LORRAINE CANDY is the editor-in-chief of Elle magazine.