We are all familiar with the kind of thing a school child will proudly bring home to his mother from his art class. A strange structure with lots of coloured tissue paper and other stuck-on items all optimistically daubed with poster paint. Magazine photos may be pasted on, or odd household items added with diligent enthusiasm. Some works of art of this sort are produced by quite well thought of painters. Look at this work by Cornell, for example. It has a very "Hundred and one things a girl can make and do" feel about it. It is probably better constructed than would be possible for an eight-year-old, although not by an order of magnitude. We can envisage the paste pot, the drawing pins, the things that mommy kindly contributed. We even wonder - seeing the appearance of a hanger rail at the bottom - whether the principal component might not be a cupboard of some sort, turned upside down. We can see the annual report "…Buster has experimented with different materials, and shown purposeful endeavour in combining them into a coherent work " Yet there is something about this untitled work which does not sustain our classroom painting view. The work, whilst it may not electrify a normal person, has a certain competence which is well beyond even the Year Six capability. The neatness of the container for the ball, and its orthogonal agreement with the frame, is against us. The tidiness of the white lattice and a certain harmonious placing of the picture postcards or photos pasted onto the backboard, are grown-up features. There is some natural clumsiness associated with the Year 4-6 artist that is lacking here. I feel as if I have seen some excellent Year 4 paintings in galleries, but must admit that finding them at will is not so easy. Personally I would like to have seen coloured tissue cut into irregular shapes stuck on the glass, or perhaps better, around the frame, of this work - it would have given a much greater degree of Year Four verisimilitude.

Irvine's work, Archway, (right), evokes nostalgia for the old certainties of the Year Six classroom. Our teacher encouraged the use of colour, discouraged "figurative" work, and got excited by the bold brushing of poster or powder paint on cartridge paper. One remembers the walls of the class resplendent with such pieces. It was annoying to have one's incompetent attempts at drawing a footballer scoring a goal belittled as conservative, but in some ways it was a worthwhile suffering. One learned that merit in painting was heavily dependent on the influence of the most powerful figures in the local firmament - in our case the teacher. But once again I have found that I can't continue with my analogy of Year Six with Irvine. It works to an extent, but rather like de Kooning, in the case of toddler painting, I find long exposure to Irvine begins to seduce me - which, frankly most pictures pinned up on the old classroom wall did not.

Criteria for classroom painting: