In case you've been feeling nostalgic for the days when the internet was convulsed by Wagatha Christie and blue or white dresses rather than mutant virus strains, take heart, because things are looking up. First there was Cat Lawyer to provide us with a glimmer of respite from the misery of 2021. And now there's the North West painting mystery.
The drama started on Tuesday, when Kim Kardashian shared a painting by her seven-year-old daughter, North West, on Instagram – an act of fond parenting to which most of us can relate, if you swap out the family WhatsApp group for a few hundred million followers.
As with all matters Kardashian, North West’s painting was not your average seven-year-old’s stick-man efforts. The painting, captioned “My little artist North”, is an early Monet-esque pastoral landscape of snow-capped mountains, soaring pines, delicate flowers and a slowly meandering river, which draws the viewer’s eye deep into the work, posing questions about the passing of time, the futility of human existence and, not to put too fine a point on it, whether a child of seven could possibly have done this themselves.
@camrynfred #stitch with @you.will.never.know.123 #greenscreen #northwest #northwestpainting when Kim is literally not lying
♬ original sound - Camryn
A few cynical sleuths on the internet and in the mainstream US media, who seem to have been locked up for too long, came right out and suggested North's effort – which drew comparison to the paintings of Bob Ross, the United States' Don Conroy – may be slightly too accomplished to be entirely plausible.
"Did North West Really Paint This?" pondered Vulture. "North West did not paint this", the US edition of the Mail responded. "North West Probably Did, In Fact, Paint That Painting," Jezebel countered, while Vanity Fair took things to a more cerebral level: "The New Frontier in Art Criticism: Did Kim Kardashian's Seven-Year-Old North West Really Do the Art or Not?"
Did she? Didn’t she? Have we all just lost our minds? Yes, there’s a lot else going on in the world, but, 11 months into a global pandemic, we’re all fraying around the edges.
Kardashian women are nothing if not deeply invested mothers, and Kim did not take well, as she put it on Instagram, to “grown adults breaking down whether or not my child actually painted this! How dare you,” she demanded, “see children doing awesome things and then try to accuse them of NOT being awesome!?!?!”
“DON’T PLAY WITH ME WHEN IT COMES TO MY CHILDREN!!!” she warned, going on to explain that her daughter and her best friend have been taking “a serious oil painting class”. North, she added, worked “incredibly hard on her painting which took several weeks to complete… PERDIOTDDDDDABCDEFGZFDT!!!!”
By way of evidence of her daughter’s artistic abilities, she reposted a video of a Hermès Birkin bag – which typically costs anything from €30,000 to €400,000 – that North “created” for her mother using advanced finger-painting techniques back in 2013. That’s the kind of act that would have you permanently banned from access to all forms of indelible art materials in less enlightened houses.
The mystery was eventually brought to its disappointingly prosaic resolution on TikTok, where Camryn Frederickson explained that her mother, Celeste Astor Frederickson, who is responsible for the "serious oil painting" classes, starts by teaching all of her students that precise painting.
"Everyone that comes through her classes goes through this exact same painting when they're starting out," she said, and went on to make a convincing case for the defence that Donald Trump's more lacklustre legal team might do well to study.
So, mystery solved, but that got us through another few hours in lockdown. North West did the painting, but as ever, there’s only one true artist here, and it’s Kim herself.
