Kid Art

Several months ago, I bought three blank canvasses in the hopes that my kids would create some fabulous artwork to adorn my walls. I got the idea from the speech pathologist who evaluated the twins (twice). Her whole office was decorated with canvasses painted by the kids in her clientelle, and they looked really cool.

I finally got around to this one afternoon a couple of weeks ago after M came home from school. It was warm and sunny out, and E and Z were sitting at their little picnic table on the deck drawing in their notebooks. Since everyone was already focused on art, I thought it would be a good time to introduce this project. I gathered the supplies, carefully choosing paints in the palette I wanted, finding old T-shirts to cover their clothes (and covering myself and the entire kitchen in blue paint when I squeezed too hard and a plug of dried paint burst out followed by half the paint tube--I had neglected to cover myself in an old T-shirt, and to put the paint on trays outside!).

M quickly dashed off an airplane--the only thing in his artistic repertoire at this time. E came over and joined us, applying beautiful swirls of color, until he got tired, or annoyed with me moving the canvas around to keep his sleeves out, and smeared together the colors at the end. Z came in at this time, swirled all the paints together from the start and made a muddy blob on the canvas (the irony is that I had just been watching him very intently copy a pair of airplanes that M had drawn, and thought to myself that he might be an artistic prodigy...thank you my little Zen master for setting me straight!)

So I'm ashamed to admit I was a little disappointed in the results, and left the canvasses piled on a corner of our counter for a few weeks, until last week I noticed C was piling things on top of them and they were going to get wrecked. I took another look at them and decided that I really did love them after all. Picassos? No. Rembrant? Un-uh. Not even Jackson Pollocks. But they are colorful, fabulous bits of NOW in my children's lives. And they have a new home.