My granddaughters live in Glasgow and one time when I was up there we went for a walk and they took a few fat chalks with them. We had stopped for a rest and they began to make chalk drawings on a road that went through the local park. It seemed to be such an obvious and natural thing to do and it took my mind back to the 1950s when as children we used to draw in the road using any broken bits of stone that would make a mark. Most of the drawing was done in my day to aid the playing of games. This might be hopscotch if there were girls involved or football and cricket if it was boys. But we also drew people and things including roads and other places for our toys to inhabit, tiny towns like those play-mats you can now buy from the shops. There were far less cars about in those days and streets were as much for children to play in, as for ease of automobile transport.
Hopscotch was always a favourite game and like so many games its origins lie in warfare. It was originally a way for Roman soldiers to train in full uniform and with heavy equipment on their back, hopping was a way that they could learn to keep their balance and dexterity when laden down. If you can't remember the rules, they go like this: each player needs a marker of some kind either a rock, stick, or some other object like a glove or hat to pickup when they return. The first player throws the marker into the first square without it touching any of the lines. If it touches the lines or goes out of bounds they are out and it’s the next players turn.
Once a player has successfully thrown the marker, they hop on one leg (often through squares 1, 2, 3) or two, (when two squares are side by side as above, 4/5) until the course is complete, always avoiding touching the lines. The game can be made more challenging by hopping on one foot throughout the course to the end of the first leg. Players must only make one jump into the last double foot square. Therefore in order to be set up for the return, players must jump from the second to last square and spin 180 degrees to land in the top (in the case above the 7/8) squares facing the starting point. From what I remember, the game got faster and faster as it went on and this was how the best players were finally eliminated.
Tony Luciani: Elia Luciani plays hopscotch
The artist Tony Luciani was still working with his mother, when she was 93 and had dementia. By engaging with her around the game of hopscotch, his mother could get both physical and mental exercise. Tony was also able to make an image that contracts time, the game being one his mother remembered playing as a girl and as he worked with her to make his images, she was brought into his world, rather than being excluded because of her condition. Hopscotch allows Luciani's mother to return to the innocence of play, her dementia allowing her access to an inner child, her adult life being gradually erased. What we tend to see as a terrible illness perhaps in some cases is a journey back into a time of innocence, a time before the cares of life have weighed us down.
Frances Alys has for years been filming children playing games. He filmed 'Hopscotch' in the Sharya Refugee Camp in Iraq. Children are forever inventive and able to construct imaginative worlds out of whatever and wherever they find themselves. In amongst a situation that could drive them to the edges of despair, these children remind us that we are all born with the ability to play games and that the simple ability to mark out ground can lead to a communal idea, perhaps even more easily than lines scratched into the earth to demarcate ownership.
Frances Alys: Hopscotch 2016
Hopscotch somewhere sandy
Just as children will draw in the sand, so will artists.
Picasso
The artist Andres Amador also makes drawings on the beach, drawings that he is happy to see being washed away by the tide. Using a drone, he takes a picture of the work from above once completed, his geometric structures in many ways resembling lines of giant hop scotch squares. Perhaps he is reliving his childhood, being an artist gives you the licence to be a child, or as Picasso put it, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
Andres Amador
When boys we often made makeshift goals by roughly drawing an outline on a wall. These outlines are everywhere if you keep a lookout for them, I pass some on my way into the university every time I walk in and sometimes scratched lines in regular use become traced over with chalks or even painted, to form a slightly more permanent idea.
Sometimes I am reminded of the history of art by things you can see in the street. In the case of the image below the painted football goal is on a plaster skimmed wall and we are very aware of this because the plaster is breaking away and the image is already incomplete. So much of our historical reference to painting is on similar surfaces.
From photographer Michael Kirkham's 'Football Goals'
A damaged fresco
Just as the painting of a football goal is now revealed to have been done on plaster that was itself laid on to cover a brick wall, the damage to the fresco above has revealed the layers of its making. The football goal it could be argued is rather like a minimalist abstract painting, the construction of it being very similar to that of fresco painting.
Cricket stumps
The streets are where we used to play and where play begins so does art. Perhaps we need to reclaim our streets from the car. In the late1990s Methley Terrace in Leeds was greened to see what would happen if the cars were taken out. So it is possible.
Turfing the Methley's
Kolams, an art using rice flour laid down as drawings on the ground in front of homes by women gives sanctity to the spot where they are drawn. These drawings are a welcoming sign to the Goddess Lakshmi who is believed to bring wealth and prosperity.
What was a daily morning ritual has recently spun off as a Chennai kolam competition. However this tourist trade development, has not destroyed the core motivation for ritual, reminding us that it is possible to inventively engage with the streets of our cities.
Murmurations: Lou Sheppard
During the time of Covid19, artists found that they were still needed, in particular as they were able to quickly and inventively rethink how people could interact with the surrounding environment, especially if there was a sense of some sort of ritual engagement. Lou Sheppard was one such artist. Murmurations: Scores for Social Distancing were a series of dance works based on bird flocking behaviour. The choreography required seven dancers to perform an interconnected set of movements while never coming within two meters of each other. As a public art work Murmurations consisted of the notation-directional markings that formed a choreographic score painted onto the road surface. The markings referenced the social distancing directions that began to be seen everywhere in public spaces. The work was in effect a visual score for the choreography of social distancing and it highlighted an awareness of the new collective public rituals that were being developed.
I remembered Lou Sheppard's work because it was very similar to hopscotch, a game that I participated in when I was a boy. The ritual chanting of the girls, which if I remember was something like, "Wibbly-wobbly turn around. Wibbly-wobbly touch the ground. Wibbly-wobbly tie your shoe. Wibbly-wobbly that will do", set alongside the queuing up to wait your turn and the sound of the hopping feet, rasping breath, all set around the chalk drawn diagram for hopping. It was a ritual that I can still feel the excitement of, it continues to sit inside my body; the waiting for your turn, envisioning how to do the game faster and without mistakes and how this as an achievement would make me appear, even if only for a moment, a winner amongst my peers. I look back on those moments as being some of the best times of my life. Out of such games were being made social bonds, physical tests of skill and dexterity and group dynamics that were ritually being encoded. To paraphrase Bob Dylan:
! wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could play simply in that street again
Ten-thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that
That we could play simply in that street again
Ten-thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that
Perhaps I'm thinking of hopscotch in these terms as a way of reflecting on my own loss of innocence. The photographer Andy Wright recorded the image below of a hopscotch layout in Barcelona. When I first saw it I was reminded of the fact that the shape of the drawn elements are very similar to the basic layout of the human body, the head in this case having being cut off by the drop. Whoever drew it was very aware of making an image to represent the end of innocence.
Andy Wright: Hopscotch to oblivion
See also:
Drawing as the trace of.a touch The Mohs hardness test: Something every child will have done instinctively.
A history of drawing as thinking The line as a territory marker
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