This viral ‘post-Play-Doh’ art is hardly Picasso, but it is strangely touching

It was a beautiful gesture: romantic in conception, if a touch less so in execution. As a gift for his wife, Kate, Jamie Matthias decided to paint her portrait. The result, depicting Mrs Matthias clasping a Wallace doll whose toothy grimace eerily mirrors her own broad grin, was described by Anita Anand of Radio 4’s PM programme as having a “post-Play-Doh aesthetic” - which sounds harsh, but actually errs on the side of flattery.

Amused, though not surprised, by her husband’s lack of artistic talent (the Matthiases paint together with their children as a family activity), Kate Matthias posted the picture to their Facebook and Instagram account: Terrible Art by Jamie Matthias. Whereupon it went viral and they were besieged by art lovers demanding that he paint their portraits. With no studio (he works at the dining-room table) and a day job as an account manager, Jamie now spends his evenings fulfilling commissions. There is a five-week waiting list.

Asked for her option of Jamie’s work, the artist Hazel Soan tactfully recalled Picasso’s line about taking many years to learn to paint like a child. But even Jamie Matthias’s children think his paintings are hilariously bad - so what is the strange charm that makes strangers pay him to paint their portrait?

Naive art has been a popular genre since Picasso discovered the tax collector and self-taught artist, Henri “Douanier” Rousseau, and held a banquet in his honour. The Cornish fisherman Alfred Wallis took up painting in his 70s, after the death of his wife in 1922. His sea-themed works, executed in house paint on scraps of cardboard, were taken up by the St Ives artists, Ben Nicolson and Christopher Wood, and are now on show at Tate St Ives.

These self-taught artists shared a quality that Jamie Matthias cheerfully admits he lacks: talent. The childishness of his paintings is not the sort Picasso took years to learn. Yet there is something about them that attracts people. Perhaps it is the unmistakable authenticity of their cheerful incompetence: “I try my best”, he says.

Modern art can seem unapproachable or utterly baffling: non-fungible tokens (NFTs) sell for millions, despite having no tangible form and an ominous potential to lose their value (or succumb to the dire-sounding “link rot”). The Matthias oeuvre, by contrast, is gloriously grounded. His portraits may not look like their subjects, but they radiate a comic and strangely touching humanity.

No country for old people

What is a good word for (to borrow the terminology of the Book of Common Prayer) “such as are of Riper Years”? Middle-aged? Elderly? Old? Or the genteel Senior?

If you work for the NHS, none of those. Its guidance for staff on “how to talk about different age groups” includes a list of prohibited descriptors, including all the above, along with OAP, old age pensioner, and pensioner. “Adults aged 65 and over” is the correct usage, in case you were wondering. Or, at a stretch, “older person”. By issuing such guidance while its corridors are lined with older persons being cared for (or not) on trolleys because the wards are full, the NHS seems (as quite often), to be dusting the windowsills while the house burns down. But for once its linguistic convolutions may actually have a point.

Interviewed on Radio 3 last Saturday, the conductor Sir Simon Rattle, who turned 70 yesterday, remarked, “I realise I’m reaching the age where normal people are retired, and I feel like I’m just beginning”. Meanwhile Dame Helen Mirren (79) was recently photographed filming in perishing weather at Kensal Green crematorium for Guy Ritchie’s latest television series, Fixer.

Sir Simon and Dame Helen’s talents are exceptional, but their undimmed verve and zest for life in their riper years perhaps not so much. Not everyone over 50 (or 70, for that matter) is reconciled to a life of daytime telly and dutifully doing Wordle in an attempt to preserve their marbles.

What could be the mot juste for this lively cohort? If “man” or “woman” seems too divisive, perhaps “person”? Or, in the case of the 78-year-old on whom the eyes of the world are currently riveted, “Mr President”.