Blocks, blocked, and unblocked

I have been making art since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I won an art prize when I was around 5 years old, with a painting of a steam engine. I remember being so excited about winning this prize, and the fact I would have to attend the Steam Engine Rally to collect my prize. I remember the exhibit of all the children’s art, including my painting, curated like an art gallery on an old but restored railway goods carriage. It was all very exciting, and I was very excited that my prize would be paints and brushes.

When it came time for the presentation, I remember climbing the wooden steps up onto the carriage and being presented with a parcel wrapped in gift paper. I was very shy about being up there in front of the small crowd. I don’t remember saying much, just carrying my exciting prize off the railway carriage stage gallery trying not to fall down the steps.

When I opened the parcel later I was confused. The prize for the art competition was a set of nine wooden blocks with a wooden board. On the face of each block was part of an animal, and it was nothing more than a toddler jigsaw. I still don’t know what the point of it was. It wasn’t age appropriate, it had nothing to do with art, and nothing to do with trains or steam engines. Even at that tender age I imagined the prize was someone’s unwanted Christmas gift donated to a raffle, but it wasn’t a raffle, it was a prize in an art competition, and it should have been a better prize.

I mean, as ways to support and encourage creativity in children go, that was a pretty poor effort from the teachers and organisers.

Years later I took a foundation art course that was supposed to prepare students for art school degree courses. One of the lecturers was a man who told me that I couldn’t draw, would never make good art, and shouldn’t really be on the course. To be fair, he didn’t seem to think most of the young women should be on the course, but he had a particular bee in his bonnet about me. The net result was that I did very little painting and drawing over the following thirty-odd years, always believing I wasn’t good enough. I practised creativity in many other ways, and I wanted to tell these stories, because they form part of the context of all the art I make, particularly when it comes to drawing and painting.

I remained mostly blocked in painting and drawing until 2020, when I finally started playing again. This year I have joined the Let’s Face It portrait community, which has a focus on more realistic portraits than the ones I have been doing in my mixed media practise since 2020. I am really enjoying the challenge, and the results of the first three weeks of classes are up there at the top of the post. I love taking what I learn in these varied classes and finding ways to incorporate it in my practise, and the teachers are all encouraging and inspiring.

In closing, I am absolutely in love with this painting by artist Laila Shawa (1940-2022). Shawa, a Palestinian woman born in Gaza, was one of the founders of the Rashad Shawa Cultural Centre in Rimal, Gaza. The centre was completed in 1985, and included large stained glass panels designed by Laila. I think it was around 5 years later that my white Western art lecturer trapped in the 1850s was telling women they shouldn’t be artists, and yet over in Gaza a woman had not only made art, but had been involved in building a cultural centre.

It’s interesting and jarring to put that together, particularly when I am seeing a lot of myths about Palestinian women circulating online.

The Rashad Shawa Cultural Centre was the venue for many cultural festivals and workshops, and Nelson Mandela gave a speech there. The centre was targeted and destroyed by Israeli forces in late 2023.

Zeinab Chasing the Devil (Part 2), 1992. Acrylic on paper.