Jun. 13, 2009 - Lazy Summer Days
We eat breakfast on the porch...
We paint...
It's interesting to observe their different artistic tendencies. A few years Asrat would draw something and then cover the entire page, and his drawing, with black. When he drew his family, we were all black. Not brown, but real black. And then he started drawing sharp teeth in the mouth of every person he drew. I was beginning to get worried, but he eventually shifted to more normal kid stuff--line drawings of cars and innumerable watercolors of boats on the ocean. Every once in a while he slips in a whale with sharp teeth and mouth wide open ready to attack the boat. Even so, I'm fairly sure at this point that his psyche isn't seriously damaged.
Gebre has been entirely different. He never really liked drawing. If I could get him to, for a couple of months all he'd produce were rainbows. Now, though, he's discovered the joy of watercolors and is in a "brown" stage. He's mixed all the colors of his paint tray to come up with varying shades of brown and then slap it on the paper. Mostly he won't tell me what he's making, but he did once. His response to my query was rolling his eyes and saying "It's a tree stump of course!". Right. Of course.
Biruk is yet another story. He has loved to draw since he could get ahold of any writing implement. At first, he drew on his legs, his hands, his face, his mouth, the wall, and the table. But I've finally got him remembering to ask for paper. He's very deliberate about his drawing, and likes to make small, detailed marks. He'll draw a bunch of circles and tell me "O's! Really O's!!" He'll pick a red marker and tell me his drawing is "Elmo's World!". He'll cover a whole piece of paper with 8 different colors, lines, circles, shapes, dots, little squiggles....all applied with utmost care and a great deal of thought. Unlike the other two, his first experience with tempera paints didn't turn out a mess of brown and black. He kept the paints separate, or mixed them carefully to get the shade he wanted. I wish I'd thought to take a pic of that one. Below, he's explaining his picture to me. This one is done with those No-Mess Crayola finger paints, and I'd like to take a brief moment to highly recommend them. They're a little greasy, but if you can't stand the thought of wiping a rainbow off your children and the table, they're perfect.
