Art Imitates Life

The great artists always painted with their own distinct styles. You can tell a DaVinci from a Picasso pretty easily. My kids, too, paint with their personalities. Emma tends to be a realist and a pretty good one too. At her age all her Daddy could draw was “Will toaster and Daddy toaster” you can imagine how exciting that was, two squares with arms and legs. Emma, on the other hand, likes to draw princesses and Veggie Tales characters. Her princesses are long and willowy with hair that would make Brooke Shields envious, and her vegetable characters are amazingly accurate. She likes to draw it “right” as she says. For her, realism is everything, it has to look exactly like what she intended it to be. With Emma’s paintings you never have to say “Oh that’s beautiful. What is it?” Her drawings are, and I say this as a very proud mother, amazing and I think we had better be looking for art lessons rather than ballet classes. She is a realist in real life too. She was hanging out her second story window last night and I chided her telling her that she could fall out. She said, “Its ok mom, I’ll just use my umbrella and float down like Bugs Bunny”. We always have to clarify that cartoons are NOT real and just because the Road Runner can order a space ship in the mail, and strap rockets to his roller skates doesn’t mean that we can too. At Disney World she was crushed to realize that “Story Time with Belle” didn’t mean you actually got to go climb up on her lap and have one-on-one story time. She was devastated when she found herself pushed to the back of a herd of 50 plus whiny preschoolers and overbearing parents straining just for a glimpse of a lip-syncing college student in a costume. When “Belle” stood up to leave Emma jumped on her seat and screamed at the top of her lungs “Belle, it’s me, Emma” as if watching the movie 100 times made her an intimate acquaintance.

Emma's Larry the Cucumber and Friends

A Rose

Eli’s art, well, hmmmm, Eli is a minimalist with tendencies toward cubism. He lacks the ability of his sister but then she has two years of fine motor skills development on him, but I think his talent will always lie in other areas. This is not to say that his creations are any less lacking in originality or personality than his sisters’. His paintings are sparse and to the point, as if getting his message across with as little expenditure of time, paint, and effort is part of the creative process. I am attaching a family portrait that he recently did in school. I’m not sure who is who but you get the general drift. In a recent assignment at Christmastime he was told to paint a Christmas tree. All of the other children’s paintings had wild swirls of green flecked all over with squiggles and dots to represent ornaments. Some children just abandoned the paint brush all together and resorted to finger painting, not Eli! His tree was the simplest representation he could think of: one long green line for the trunk and eleven shorter lines for the limbs growing out to one side. I guess that it was redundant to put limbs on both sides of the tree when one knows perfectly well how the branches of a tree grow. Why bother to draw what one can extrapolate? His decorations are on the minimalist side as well; a single silver dot at the end of each branch. Now if I can only get him to be a minimalist about his trains as well!

Eli's Christmas Tree

Eli's Family Portrait

Ethan is still growing into his artistic personality, but right now he is experimenting with murals and various artistic mediums, such as water, cereal, peanut butter and melted chocolate. Because of his current fascination with life sized art his canvases have become walls, tables, chairs and floors and so a suitable example is hard to show on something as small as this screen, although I can see the remainder of a recent work on my computer screen as I type. Ethan also believes that creativity can also be expressed not just through the creation of something but that creativity can be expressed in the destruction of an object. For example just in the writing of this entry Ethan has successfully destroyed all but one of the art projects that you see here (thank goodness I scanned them when I did). Ethan also enjoys making himself the canvass, using his body as an expression of his creativity. His preferred mediums for this expression include permanent marker, ink, crayon, peanut butter, melted chocolate and spaghetti. We find it fascinating that at such a young age he is able to combine his two loves, food and exploration into such an artistic reference. We are sure that as he develops as an artist he will find many new and exciting ways of expressing himself.

War Paint