LIVING ART

In our family, holidays are not for  - shudder - activities. Holidays are for relaxing. Ours is not the kind of  family that gets up at the crack of dawn for a hiking expedition followed by a spot of sightseeing. Instead, we prefer to immerse ourselves in Spanish culture by keeping to the Spanish hours -- that is, sleep all afternoon and stay up all night eating and drinking. Siesta is such a beautiful word, so full of lazy promise. I may call my first child Siesta. 

Sometimes, though, us kids get bored, infernally bored of creeping about our comatose parents. Reclining like the Romans and eating calamari in a haze of tinto de verano has it perks, but for the restless, shiftless London girl the novelty quickly fades.

It was somewhat counter-intuitive, then, when this summer's annual Mallorcan holiday turned into a hotbed of activity. We became obsessed with a new project, which we called 'Living Art'.

 It all started last year at the National Gallery's Leonardo DaVinci exhibition, when we noticed a striking resemblance between Cecilia Gallerani's ermine and Alice's new puppy, Inca. Inca frequently gets called the 'white rat' by those who are less taken by her. But we would argue that she looks more like a stoat, or indeed an ermine, for she is a cultured kind of dog.  

Then in the spring we came across David Hockney's 1972  piece Pool with Two Figures, part of a series of paintings by the artist involving swimming pools. This particular pool, however, looks exactly, spookily like the Mallorcan pool we spend so much time lying around. 

 It was another sign: the Californian swimming pool and the mountains in the background were so similar to the ones we knew. We flipped the mountains around using Photoshop, but otherwise everything is completely staged by us -- I told you we got bored. We sourced the brown shoes and white trousers in the market, and found the orange jacket languishing in one of the moth eaten cupboards in the old villa. 

I was cast as the man in the water and my 14-year-old sister Claudia as the man in the orange jacket, and my other sisters Rachel and Alice were creative directors. It took about fifteen minutes to get the perfect shot during which time I had to float underwater with strict instructions not to come up. Considering I nearly drowned and got hypothermia in the unheated pool in early spring, its fair to say we got slightly engrossed and overtly serious about the whole thing, which had started of as a joke and quickly became an obsessive 'project'. Much to the bewilderment of the other guests staying at the villa.

 And a few months ago we learned that a friend of a friend showed it to David Hockney, the man and muse himself!

We framed it and gave it to our dad for his birthday. I think he is still fairly bewildered.

Our cat Pushkin attempted some Living Art of his own:

It all was to lead up to our Magnum Opus, Dejeuner sur L'Herbe. Which really sums up, in a painting, how we feel at the end of two weeks of eating and drinking, with no clothes on. Stiff, bored, slightly overweight. We are all quite swarthy in skin tone, so had to enlist our friend and collaborator, Verity, to be the ivory-skinned muse.

My Photoshop skills have greatly improved since then, so I will admit this piece is subject to more than a little bit of savvy doctoring. But we are nonetheless pretty satisfied with the result. Now the summer's over - onto projects new. Oh, and, here are some (in our opinion pretty inferior) attempts that other people have done, although they are nonetheless entertaining.

--Isobel