These sculptures evolve by first making the skeleton from a wire armature, then putting on muscles with masking tape, and finally the skin of papier maché. They all somehow turn out to resemble Giacometti maquettes, long skinny creatures, figures supposedly in motion.
You can't really rely on 12 and 13-year olds to not get carried away with throwing paint around, or to put a sheet of paper on the table so that it covers the entire table, can you? So we ended up with splatters of red, yellow and blue paint all over several chairs, and the floor all around the two painting tables was a wonderful mixture, into which one intrepid child who volunteered to "clean up" happily danced around with bare feet, then asked me to give her permission to go barefoot "pieds nus" (feet that are nude), for the rest of the day, seeing as she could never put her shoes back on those filthy feet again.
So I called the receptionist to ask the janitor to bring me a mop. She exclaimed, "Oh dear!", without even knowing what it was for, and when the janitor arrived he tutted and fumed at the state of the floor, even though I had said all I wanted was to borrow a mop! Art is messy, and learning to clean up is surely a good thing for kids. (The janitor is actually a lovely man, compared to the last one we had, whose veins bulged whenever he had anything to do with me! He really had a passionate distaste for all things arty, for any sign of a free spirit.)
At the end of the day, I was sitting working at the computer, when the janitor came in with the woman in charge of the night-cleaning crew, who expressed her horror at the state of the floor by clasping her hand to her mouth and remaining speechless for several seconds. The paint was all cleaned up, but there was still a layer here and there of greasy charcoal from the elementary school students after our mopping. After she had composed herself she said that she would have to talk to the grounds supervisor because it takes much longer to clean the floor when it is like this. So no doubt we will be in trouble with the grounds supervisor. I felt like a naughty school-girl. Artists are just so misunderstood!
The New England Aquarium has built an entire new wing to accommodate sick and stranded sea animals, and just in time, as 135 sea turtles have been washed up on Cape Cod in the last couple of weeks, 100 of which were still alive. They suffer from hypothermia, having somehow lost their way while on migration and finding themselves in very cold seas. The aquarium workers slowly raise their temperatures over a couple of days, treat them and in a few weeks they will be taken back to their migratory route and released in the warmer currents.
"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated." - Mahatma Gandhi.
No comments:
Post a Comment