My 5-year-old often gets frustrated with his drawings, crumbles them up, and throws them across the room. I pick them up when he isn’t looking and paste them in my notebook.
Yesterday he helped me with my diary:
An open dictionary
I have blogged before about my love for my paper dictionary, but a few days ago I posted this reminder to Instagram:
Someone yesterday seemed incredulous that I had a paper dictionary open on my desk. Let me tell you: it is the best $5 you will spend at Goodwill. Keep it open nearby, and look up words in it constantly. (This one is an American Heritage.) As you’re looking for a word, you will be distracted by other words. This is a feature, not a bug. If you don’t know what to write about, you can just turn to a random page and start reading and stealing words. Bonus points if you use a pencil to mark words you’ve looked up and why. I also keep one open in the living room and look up definitions with the kids when they want to know what a word means.
And just a few days later, I discovered that my kindergartner (although, are you really a kindergartener if you never actually go to kindergarten?) had got into my stamp pad and done this:
The Unschooled Artists
On Sunday, the boys achieved one of my professional dreams: a full page of drawings in The New York Times! They were published along with an essay I wrote about the creative hijinks they’ve been up to during quarantine. You can read the piece online here.
It ends:
“You can’t really teach art,” said John Baldessari, “you can just sort of set the stage for it.”
So here’s an assignment, from our house to yours: Forget school for now. Give your household time, space, and materials, and fill the rest of the summer with art.
It was an extra thrill to be part of “The Diary Project,” as it started with a page by my hero, Lynda Barry, and went on to feature pages by some of my very favorite cartoonists, including: Anders Nilsen, Wendy MacNaughton, Ivan Brunetti, Esther Pearl Watson, and Eleanor Davis.
Big thanks to Alicia DeSantis — I pitched her “The Chronovirus,” then some of my houses alongside Jules’ drawings of the Three Little Pigs, and she had the keen editorial sense to say, “What if we just ran the boys’ drawings?”
The boys were quite pleased on the whole, but Owen would like everyone to know that there’s one glaring error in my text: Super Kleon Bros. is not an “imaginary” video game! He is busy making the music and coding the game in Scratch. (I told him he should send a letter to the editor.)
Exquisite corpse
Above are three “exquisite corpse” drawings my boys and I made this afternoon. (Top: Jules, 5; middle: Owen, 7; bottom: me, 37.) Exquisite Corpse was a game invented by the Surrealists:
Participants play by taking turns drawing sections of a body on a sheet of paper, folded to hide each individual contribution. The first player adds a head—then, without knowing what that head looks like, the next artist adds a torso, and so on. In this way, a strange, comical, often grotesque creature is born.
Today went more smoothly and resulted in more inspiring results than last week’s session, which, if I remember correctly, ended in tears. One problem is that we swapped which body parts each drawer was responsible for each time, which I think was confusing:
I’m trying really hard to get the boys to be more improvisational with their play together, particularly the 7-year-old, who tends to art direct everyone and to fly off the handle when things progress in a way that doesn’t align with his vision. (I’m not a particularly good collaborator myself, come to think of it.)
We got a good tip from this video: draw the neck and the legs slightly over the fold so the next person knows where to begin.
Update: we made a goofy video to show how it’s done!
Humpty Dumpty
Here are some collages made with my 5-year-old’s discarded drawings of Humpty Dumpty.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
My copy of The Annotated Alice tells me that the original Humpty could’ve been a cannon which was on top of a tower that collapsed after bombardment, an alcoholic drink, and a children’s game. I like what Humpty Dumpty tells Alice about using big words: “When I make a word do a lot of work like that, I always pay it extra.”
Errol Morris once said of journalism, “It’s the Humpty-Dumpty dream of putting the world back together again, to make sense of it.”
(He could’ve been talking about collage.)
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