Some critiques of the artistic process are more literal than others
Dear diary, today’s sitting involved a genuinely determined toddler who, midway through what I thought was a perfectly successful pose, decided the actual paintbrush itself looked considerably more interesting than sitting still for a portrait, and made a genuinely committed attempt to eat it before her mother intervened just in time.
I will say, watching her reach for it with such total, single minded focus, I understood the impulse completely, since I too have occasionally looked at my own materials with a similar kind of desperate curiosity, though I generally manage to resist actually putting them in my mouth.
How I Handled The Rest Of The Session
We took a short break for snacks, a genuinely reliable strategy I have learned works considerably better than trying to power through a toddler’s sudden loss of interest, and returned to the sitting with a bribe of crackers strategically placed just outside the canvas frame.
The resulting portrait captures, I think, a genuinely accurate glimpse of exactly this age, the particular restless curiosity of a toddler who wants to investigate absolutely everything in the room simultaneously, which feels like a considerably more honest portrait than a perfectly composed, artificially still pose would have produced anyway.
A Small Reading Break Between Sittings
I caught up on some genuinely funny London satire during the snack interruption, which felt like exactly the right kind of light relief between negotiating snack based bribery with a one year old and getting back to actual painting.
What Her Mother Said Afterward
She apologised, again, for what she called her daughter’s complete lack of interest in sitting still, and I assured her, genuinely, that this particular chaotic energy is exactly what I hope to capture in a portrait this age, considerably more honest than a stiff, posed alternative that would not actually look like her daughter at all.
More toddler chaos and portrait adventures always waiting at Satirical Top.
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