KS2 Art and Design: YolanDa Brown looks at A Boy Bringing Bread by Pieter de Hooch

YOLANDA BROWN:

I'm YolanDa Brown. I'm a musician and broadcaster.

The superpower of looking is really important to me as a musician and also as a broadcaster. When I'm making music, it's based in improvisation, so I'm always looking in my mind's eye, so to speak. I see colours when I'm performing. So, if it's sort of an energetic sound, it's an orange or a red, and if it's more of a ballad or a more flowy sound, I see greens and blues, and I think that style of looking is important as well.

I'm here at the Wallace Collection to see a very special painting. It's called 'A Boy Bringing Bread'. I'm gonna go and look for it. Come with me.

Oh, there it is: 'A Boy Bringing Bread'. I can see him. I'm immediately drawn to him. He's smiling. He's got lovely long hair and he'squite well dressed, actually. And he's got a white cap on there. I'm drawn to his smile. He looks like he's happy bringing the bread. There's something quite nice about this corner here, because I feel like I'm in the room with the lady, but then you can see outside and there's a nice tiled flooring, but then you can go back again into another room, which has got black and white flooring, and then you can go out even further. And then there's another lady looking over.

The colours – when i'm looking at the lady, the bright red of her dress makes me feel happy in a way. The smile as well, so all in that same area. The boy's smiling. It's quite joyful, actually. Even though there's quite dark colours in the room that we're in with the lady, it's quite bright. It could be summer.

In terms of the shapes, there's a lot of straight lines. So, you've got the squares of the floor of the tiles, both in this room, the further room going back, and back and back. The door is quite square. The windows are square. Even the stained glass windows, you've got squares and rectangles. So there isn't really very rounded shapes, per se, apart from the boy and I think that's what makes you feel soft towards him.

I mean the more I look at it, the more I'm seeing different things. I was immediately drawn to this side of the painting because of the void, but there's a chair there with a lovely cushion. I think that's quite nice. In fact, there's even sort of like coats of arms on the windows, which I hadn't noticed initially. So maybe it's something to do with the family, which again would make you think that they're quite well off. And again, that lady in the background, I mean, she could be a nosy neighbour, but she could also be the boy's mum making sure that he got there safely. Maybe she made the bread.

It's really fun to make up those stories and I do the same in music. Whenever I'm improvising, it's not necessarily about the notes that I play, I think about, 'What am I trying to say to the audience? What's the story that I'm trying to tell?' It's about making it up and and feeling free within the art.

Oh, I've just seen this. Look even closer. This wall out here – you can see the bricks if you look really closely.

Taking a step back, you realise that somebody had to paint this. Every single little detail. Brilliant!

I think it's really great that I've been able to spend so much time with this painting and it's made me think that you don't need to know a lot about the painter or what time period it was made in. You can actually just enjoy looking at it and I think that's the best thing about going to see artwork.