Play and art make for a life of creative fulfilment
and her new one Art Play. In short, she is the embodiment of the artist Corita Kent’s epigraph quoted at the beginning of Art Play: “Play is a way of working and work is a way of playing.”
How many of us can say that? Not many perhaps. We put away childish things, don’t we? How often do people draw once past school age? “I genuinely think it doesn’t even come into their way of thinking,” says Deuchars. “It’s been compartmentalised. That is for children and not for us.”
She wishes it were not so. She has even spent the last few years in her books encouraging children and adults to have fun with drawing. Art Play is the latest of them, a beautifully by-her-ownhand designed expression of belief in the worth of being arty.
The thing is, she says, there’s a real appetite out there for it or something similar. Look at the current love of baking and crafts, even the taste for grown-up colouring books. When it comes down to it, so many of us want to play in some way or other.
But it’s encouraged out of us. Perhaps because we live in a culture that is suspicious of anything that doesn’t have an immediate use value (flogging colouring books apart). The truth is we seem to care more about what art and crafts may be worth than the worth of art and crafts themselves.
It’s an attitude that’s built into us, Deuchars reckons. “It’s all just part of growing up. It starts quite early. It must have something to do with the western teaching of art. We try to move towards this realism. We don’t really encourage playfulness. We sort of say: ‘You’ve done your squiggles and funny lines. Now you’ve got to turn those squiggles and funny lines into something real.’
“That’s why as we grow into adults we’ve already lost that element of art for pleasure, art for fun. It has become art to make something ‘real’, art to be academic and grown up.”
And that’s only if art is still part of the mix at all. Earlier this month the exam board AQA announced it was axing art history as an A Level subject south of the Border following the Government’s changes to the syllabus. Not really a ringing endorsement of the value of art it has to be said.
“I think the arts have been categorised as a soft subject,” Deuchars suggests. “Soft as in not serious.” And yet the creative industries, including fine and commercial art, are a huge contributor to GDP in the UK as a whole. It’s also part of the country’s soft power outreach. We undervalue it at our peril.
But perhaps it was ever thus. When she was at Grangemouth High back in the 1970s the idea of going to art school was seen as a gamble. It was even suggested she should consider a career as an interior decorator instead because that was seen as a safer option. But she was single-minded about what she wanted to do. She still is.
These days Deuchars is the mother of two boys, Hamish and Alexander, married to graphic designer Angus Hyland. She grew up one of six children in her Grangemouth home, playing in the nearby Kinneil Wood and around Callendar House, close by James Watt steam engine prototypes and the Antonine Wall. She was, she now realises, surrounded by the marks of history and industry and, she accepts, they made a mark on her.
Kinneil Wood, she says, is “one of my favourite places in the world and I’ve travelled quite a lot. The blackness of it in the middle, with shafts of light. It’s a beautiful medieval wood. I loved that whole contrast of the industrial next to incredible Favourite artist Miro maybe. Because of his joy in colour and his playfulness. He never lost that ability of not just painting like a child, but having that energy and freshness children paint with. Favourite musician There’s a German contemporary classical composer I like called HansJoachim Roedelius. He’s worked with Brian Eno before. Career high Working for the Guardian or publishing my first book. Career low There was a big trend for company reports a while ago and I was doing a lot of them. It was slightly soul-destroying because you’re sending the same message out all the time beauty. I was very lucky to grow up around that”.
Her father was an electrical fireman at Grangemouth’s ICI plant (as it was then). Her mother was a housewife and later a cook. Her parents were both good with their hands. Father made them all toys. Mother made them all clothes. Making and doing was part of the family story then.
She also went to a school where one of her art teachers personally knew Salvador Dali. These human connections meant the possibility of being an artist was always in front of her.
She left home at 18, in 1983, to study at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee. She then left for London and the Royal College of Art to study for a Master of Arts in Illustration.
Of course in the late 1980s Britain was in a recession and it took her time to get established. Maybe 10 to 15 years, she reckons. Was there ever a point where she felt it wasn’t going to work? “I don’t think I did, luckily enough. You only need a little encouragement. Even if that didn’t always end up in financial reward or big jobs, there was always the promise of it and that was enough to keep me going.
“You’ve got to be quite resilient in the arts. You have to believe in yourself.”
Soft is not the word for her then. That was probably already obvious. Where did that self-belief come from? “It’s a good question and one I have appreciated more and more as I have got older. What makes the difference? Why do you get up out of bed? Why do you make art? And it’s because of this inner belief.
“I did have this unquestioning belief from my parents that you can do whatever you want. I’m not even sure I’m a parent like that. I think I’m much more controlling.
“Maybe it just comes from a happy, secure childhood. And there were six kids, so it was quite competitive from an early age.”
She had years where she didn’t much enjoy what she was doing but now she has managed to carve out a space for herself to play.
The challenge for the rest of us is to somehow work it into our daily round when there are so many distractions. If we live on screens all the time when do we have time to lose ourselves in other things? Her own children, she says, only get half an hour of screen time a day and they have to read for half an hour before. “I’m a tough mum,” she laughs.
But she believes anyone can make the effort if they want. Anyone can draw. What does it matter what it looks like? “I was reading somewhere that making art with our hands was there before language. And so it does tap into a deeper level of consciousness, I think. And that’s why it gives us so much pleasure and why we lose ourselves in it. Because it’s doing something we can’t put into words very easily.
“We always want to put things into words. We want to say what it is. But I think it’s important not to put it into words actually. If you get a tactile pleasure in a bit of squidgy paint or drawing something that doesn’t make sense, it has a validity. We’re too fixated on what we’re making rather than the journey through what we’re making.” Art Play by Marion Deuchars is published by Laurence King, priced £12.95.