Understanding Art – The Pressure Cooker

Some things amuse you as much as they baffle you. My daughter always had this fascination for the pressure cooker – She would be excited at the whistling sound and a wee bit scared though. The first sound she attempted which had nothing to do with the gradual buildup of her vocabulary was a hissing sound which we interpret as an impersonation of the pressure cooker whistle. Interesting this sound is also lavishly used for other purposes. This is also the sound of pee which we try to orchestrate when she sits on her potty time and again with the zest of cheer leaders dancing to invite their favorite team on to the gridiron. The most amusing moment is of course when she tries to make the sound herself - there is immense glee in her eyes and naughty quirk around her lips and then the tongue conjures into a semicircle and the air column is excited to produce a vibration which comes out to the audible ear as a hiss.

Interesting when she started to scribble on the hapless walls and every book in my collection, she chose to draw a pressure cooker … Every time she mischievously wields a pen it is to draw this very same inanimate object !

Interestingly she always chooses the top view. Having seen these myriad times, I sat on the web to interpret what this means in terms of art. A rather inane task but I was determined to crack the code behind each of these ‘old C scrolls’. The chase began by concentrating on the art forms of the twentieth century – trusting that he must have been influenced by what she sees around the house and the in her ambience which is bridled with etched of modernism as we understand.
Since most of the century has been marked by clear focus on abstract art in which pastels, lines and figures have always been independent of the subject matter.

Did it have anything to do with Fauvism ? There were moods of ‘les fauves’ – wild scribbles and there were also traces of the remarkable alacrity and pace of most such works. But then she never tried to mix colors into the boundaries of the art and let the lines define the picture.

Cubism? All the pictures were single dimensional and a immediate representation of the picture she sees in the perpendicular plane. There were never the multiple dimensions or interpretation of various views cluttering the diagram. So I ruled out analytical cubism and synthetic cubism without further thought.

Futurism? Definitely not. None of the various forms suggested movement or energy and she never attempted to represent the steam from the nozzle.

I ruled out Orphism when I saw the works against the back drop of the Eiffel Tower with pronounced taste for color rather than the forms.

Neo – Plasticism was exciting with its stress on lines and even audacious representation of the male and female lines. But her drawings had the blend of curvaceous lines rather than the defined straight vertical and horizontal lines.

Expressionism seemed a likely explanation – The whole picture was expressive. The place occupied by figures or objects and the empty spaces had also profound proportions

After this pensive cookie cutter syndrome where I tried to fit the simple picture into multiple forms of art – I decided to let the artist grow from being the toddler and figure out what she scribbles which are clearly nothing but the virtual impression of what sees and retains after her visual senses are out of direct sight of the object.

So now I let her scribble more pressure cookers each time with a sense of déjà vu and the joy of having created another work of art.