KS2 Art and Design: Denise Mina looks at The Pink Tablecloth by Henri Matisse

DENISE MINA:

I'm Denise Mina and I'm a writer. I write detective novels and comics and plays, and I love observing. Most people don't observe. Most people don't trust what they see, but as a writer you want to be able to describe things. You want to make people think they're in a room they're not in. You have to be able to observe things well and look at things properly. So I'm here at the Kelvingrove Art Galleries to look at some art which is one of my favourite things to do and I can describe to you how a writer uses the power of looking to create worlds and trick people and make people believe things that are just basically lies. So, come on…

Oh, I love this. This is lovely. I'm loving looking at this.

This reminds me of being on holiday. Look at the colours and how fresh they are. I love that pink and the yellow together. It makes me think maybe I should get a pink something to go with this big mad dress.

I love all the different patterns. It doesn't look like a photograph and that's because photography had just been invented, so they were looking at what can painting do that photography can't do, and what it can do is this.

The table's all wrong. It's all tipped up. What he's doing is, he's tipping it up and he's saying look at all this amazing stuff. Look at these lovely colours. And he's creating a sort of flat plain, a pattern to really entertain your eye.

Now, when I look at that, I look at how fresh the fruit is. Look at these lovely plums and there's leaves here on the lemons and that makes me think they're really fresh.

And the light is kind of white. You know that – when you get up in the middle of the summer, or you're on holiday, and the light's really amazing and you feel really fresh and excited about the day? That's the sort of white light that he's using there. And I love these flowers just because I like flowers. I really like colourful flowers.

As a writer, when you look at something like that, you think, 'Yes!', because the way to get a reader into a room and into a scene is, you describe something the reader could know. So, if i was describing that in a book and I wanted the reader to feel that they were in the room, I would describe the smell of lemons, I would describe the big doors. What's through those doors? What's the story in this room? I would describe those flowers and they're not expensive flowers, so they're flowers you get in the garden. You haven't bought those flowers from a florist. They're wild flowers.

So I know the light is coming from here, just instinctively, and then if I stop and I look, I realise the reason I know that is because there's a bit of shadow here and there's no shadow here, and there's a little bit of shadow here, and there's no shadow on that side, but I don't pick up on that until I slow down.

Just being able to stop freeze and look at what you see, that is what a writer really has to do. It's like we're moving in slow motionand everybody else has got their headphones on, sunnies on, and they're running through a room, but we have to be able to stop and look at things and I've just noticed there that you can see the texture of the paint. I love it when you can see the texture of the paint, and when you can see where they've done that with their brush because they painted really quickly. It feels as if they've just done that and walked out the room. I love that.

For me, looking is a superpower, because most people don't look. Most people don't stop and step back and assess. And being able to look at something in an art gallery – I love this. This has made my day looking at this. Lots of people feel they can't go in and just look, and you can.