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Child’s play
How do you make a children’s colouring book with a difference? Ask Britain’s leading artists to do the drawings. Jonathan Jones talked to six of them
Michael Craig-Martin: It’s a very nice idea and, as my work involves drawings and colouring in by myself, it seems not inappropriate that children could do the same. My own work relates to books in which children are taught to name things. In the first edition (Colour for Kosovo, 1999), there was a variety of things: shoes and a saucepan, and a book and a chair. I just took the same image and repeated it several times.
The idea is not for me to tell people what they should do. In the 20th century there were artists like Picasso who were interested in childlike drawings, by children. The things that interest me are grown-up drawings that teach children about the world. They are the things that everybody understands, that we all share. They mean something to everybody.
Howard Hodgkin: I think colouring books are wonderful. I think everybody should have one. At first I couldn’t get my head around the project. I don’t think this book being by artists makes any difference. I just wanted to make a simple image that a child could relate to. A tree and a silly little bird are about as obvious and simple as possible. I think the great thing is for them to function for children.
Peter Davies: At first it sounded a little bit odd, but when I saw the earlier edition it all seemed in very good faith. Some of it is quite revealing — I find it intriguing when people do a drawing. I’ve always been loath to let anyone see my drawings because I thought they were dreadful. I thought: I can’t really do something that’ll be interesting for a child to colour in.
I’m not sure I’ve succeeded. I normally do paintings that have text in them about the art world and I thought, that’s going to be just pointless. So I did a drawing of stars that’s very like a text painting I did last year about Andy Warhol.
Some of the drawings in the book are very like the artists’ other work and others aren’t. I hope that from a child’s point of view it looks nice. There are things in some of the drawings that children will find fascinating and others they might find frightening. I think Paula Rego’s and Paul Noble’s are very good. I really liked Neal Tait’s — it’s quite scary. In a way I think Damien Hirst’s is the one that works most as being what the artist does, and all you need to do is colour it in. I think it’s a nice gesture.
Julian Opie: I picked the images on the basis that they’d appeal to children — in contrast to more sombre examples of my work — and be appropriate for colouring in. The first one was a computer-generated landscape. For this one I used an image I originally did for Sadler’s Wells of fish swimming in the sea. I photographed fish in the sea on holiday in Bali and used a photograph of my daughter swimming. I didn’t stop and think too hard about it. I think the images I picked are fairly universal — houses and cars and fish.
Paul Noble: It’s very deep and profound! I thought I’d better aim for the audience. I saw the last book and they didn’t really take into consideration the people the book was aimed for - for example there was a really boring abstract painter who shows on Frith Street. My work is always in black and white and it’s interesting to see how people might colour it in.
I didn’t think it would be relevant to crank out a little bit of miserabilia but I did try and put some dark stuff like axes and knives in there because children enjoy darkness. As an artist you work with your own private obsessions and it’s nice sometimes to work more like an illustrator. The trees are chopped down because it’s a lot easier to draw! It’s a motif I use in Nobson (the dystopian “new town” that is the subject of Noble’s adult drawings) — just because it looks like we’ve been there and ripped everything down.
Keith Tyson: The difference between doing this and my normal work is that there was more of a brief. I just wanted to do something that was simple and intricate and begging to be coloured in. It’s a universal, simple form that children could have an enjoyment in colouring. This isn’t the place for individualistic or idiosyncratic content. It’s just something to enjoy.
I approached it as: what would I want to colour in as a child? It’s a simple universal form that could represent planets or molecules. It doesn’t matter which colour or creed you’re from. Ultimately it’s a colouring book, not an artists’ book. The project was undertaken at the behest of Unicef, which distributed the colouring books among children in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Ivory Coast this summer. —Dawn/Guardian Service
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