Painting for Fun

The fresh approach is an artistic will-o'-the-wisp that some professional painters chase all their lives without much success.

Last week, at Boston's Museum of Fine Art, gallerygoers got a look at the work of 125 amateurs who had caught the elusive quality without half trying. The paintings were by children, aged 6 to 14, from the city's Boys' Clubs.

No one called it great art, but the youngsters were bubbling with originality.

Flailing gleefully away, they pictured drab city blocks as tumbled lines of bulging, squeezed-in houses, and landscapes as great, uncluttered spaces dotted with trees and Indian tepees. Their figures were frightening and funny by turns--glowering, batlike adults with burning eyes, or sad, dough-faced creatures with bird-thin legs and toothless smiles. The colors were as exuberant as the designs: heads in chartreuse and grey, faces that were half yellow, half blue, with startling vermilion circles under the eyes. One of the favorites was a group project: a huge mural of Charlestown with all the details, including a nest of pigeon eggs perched on a church ledge.

Working Off Steam. The man most responsible for the exhibit is a friendly young (32) Boston artist named Alfred M. (for Milton) Duca, who has no illusions about the work of his young proteges. He knows that most of them will forget all about painting before they grow up. He doesn't care. The program aims mainly at giving Boston's slum children a chance to work off some steam and learn the pleasures of creative expression. "One thing we're trying to do here," says Duca. "is keep them out of gangs. We want to give them a chance to express their resentments through painting rather than through violence."

Duca's teaching methods are simple as they are sound. He carefully leaves the word "art" out of his discussions with the boys, and he makes no effort to dictate subject matter to them or to improve their drawing. Confronted with an indecipherable picture, he never says the familiar, discouraging words: "What's it supposed to be?"

One of Duca's first steps was to get a new medium for his youngsters, something that they could work in more easily than ordinary oils or water colors. He hit on a resin plastic which stays bright when dry, does not rub off, or run together when slopped on. The kids took to it like ducks to water. Sometimes Duca herds his charges to museums to see what grown-up professionals have accomplished, but he lets the boys draw their own conclusions from their observations.

"What's This Stuff?" When Duca led" a group of his pupils into the Boston Museum last week, the youngsters could scarcely believe their eyes. "What's all this stuff doing in here?" asked one. Duca explained that the exhibition was in their honor, and the surprise turned to whooping delight. The adult visitors were delighted, too, and impressed. In the first six days 10,000 flocked to see the show, and enthusiastic patrons paid up to $300 to the clubs for the paintings, as the best way of making sure that the program would keep right on going.

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