What was once my art studio has taken on a whole new character since my grandsons opened the door and came in. Now, I work off a table that is two feet high and I sit in chair that makes my thighs feel like I’m in the middle of a workout with a personal trainer.
Come to think of it, my grandsons are my personal trainers. They put me through a program that challenges my heart rate and endurance but unfortunately hasn’t done a darn thing for my muscle mass.
The heavy lifting I’m doing with them now usually involves broken crayons, stickers and scissors that have penguin handles. The top of our Elmer’s glue bottle is so encrusted with glue boogies that it looks like a prize-winning fungal experiment at a science fair. In my studio, where I’m building relationships and art, big words like composition, symmetry, and perspective are gibberish to the three- and five-year-old. Instead, we talk about the excavators on Blippi, or the best way to eat a popsicle and we make hats to celebrate imaginary holidays like “Take Your Possum to Work Day.”
Last week, I tried to teach the kids some basic color theory, you know, stuff about the primaries and secondaries. You may remember from grade school that using paint had its challenges in art class. That’s because somebody always stuck the blue brush in the yellow paint, and the only way you could correct that color was to ask the teacher for black paint to cover up the dark green that came out of the rusty container. For that reason, my early art paintings were dark and depressing, and made my parents worry that I was influenced by episodes of the Twilight Zone.
When we boys create a new episode out in our kid-cave, we have no idea what we’re doing, and even less of an idea what we want to see when we are finished. I rarely talk to them about the elements of art like texture or space or anything else that resembles an art principle. In fact, at this point, I can’t really tell where their projects stop and mine takes over. Accidents, serendipity, and outright flukes have officially become the governing rules of our working studio, with a healthy dash of mystery thrown in for good measure. That is just how our art works.
Yesterday when my heater went out in the studio, I called a repairman to fix it. When he walked in, he stopped for a moment, looked at the artwork on the walls, and said:
“Oh, wow! Did your kids do these?”
“No,” I answered, “those are mine.”
He stood for a moment in silence, staring at the art works, and I wondered for a moment if he was going to ask me if I had been sniffing too much gas from the pilot light. Then he said, “I always loved art, but my teacher didn’t like what I did. I took a horse I had drawn up to her desk once, which I thought was pretty good and she said, ‘Horses aren’t pink, go back and do it again.’ After that, I never really thought I was good enough for art.”
After a half hour or so, my heater was up and running again, but fixing a rejected artist and his hurt would require some overtime. With the right voice at the right time, our technician could have been the next Henri Matisse or Marc Chagall, both of whom marked their place in art history with the wildest of color schemes. His rejected pink horse would have been a horse my grandsons would have had a thousand questions about. They would have seen it as something to look for flying enchantingly through the clouds, but they would have been upset if a teacher made them change its color. After all, that would take away all the magic.
Before he left, my repairman and I agreed that of all subjects, art should be the one subject that allows many different answers. Some, like math or spelling may have only one best answer, but when we begin insisting that our children invent, draw, build, or design according to one formula, we have gone down the slippery slope of putting a stamp on what the answer has to be, and according to one art teacher, what all horses have to look like. By dismissing our children’s imagination, their sense of mystery, we say NO! to unique ways of problem solving, and in fact dismiss art as a viable learning process altogether, and of course we know what happens after that…Poof! We throw the subject of Art out of schools altogether.
Where mystery go’eth, there go’eth art.
We know this, and we know that volumes and volumes of books, as well as gardens, museums and galleries are devoted to beauty as it is revealed through artists seeking answers to their visions. When we allow this mystery to have a place in our lives, we enter their complete and satisfying universe. It is a transcendent vision, is it not, that is revealed when an artist presents us with that one-of-a-kind pink horse, the horse that guides us out of the eerie woods and lights our understanding of our world.
What is so revealing about the way kids invent is that they are undaunted by anything – materials, tools, and even time itself. The only thing that matters to them when they create is the experience, and the more mysterious the experience, the more engaged they are! Their discovery cloud overhead may look a bit wild and unpredictable until that cloud opens up, and at that moment, the full effect of a child’s imagination unleashes its energy. That is just how art works, and it is part of the child in all of us.
Of course, all artists, including my grandsons, go through different phases in their development. Like Picasso, who went through a Blue Period and a Rose Period, we boys are also going through a stage called the Food Period. It began recently when my grandson went for the yellow paint and his brush came out with the remnants of a withered French Fry and parts of the plastic wrapper from a Smucker’s Uncrustable chocolate-flavored-hazelnut-spread-sandwich.
“I didn’t see that coming,” said the five-year-old.
So…we painted the French fry, stapled the wrapper around it and designated it an official work of art. And just in case our sculpture, ala Claes Oldenburg, attracted the interest of a major Soho gallery, we mounted our sculpture securely on a podium of wood, and titled it Uncrustable Sandwich with a Side Order of Fries #1.
We were so excited about our creation that we thought we would make a bunch more, develop a whole series of these hazelnut uncrustable sculptures, but then, first we would have to make another trip to McDonald’s to get more fries.
And folks, that’s just how art works.