On summer or weekend days, right after breakfast, we have "art time." Nothing elaborate, just an immense box of markers and artist-quality sketchbooks. Sometimes we glue. Sometimes we paint. But mostly we keep it pretty simple.
This was Josephine's favorite style of art this summer-- fill the whole page with color. She now has whole sketchbooks of these strange quilts of color, although now she is moving on to more representational drawing. Eyeballs are predominant in her art; with Theo, it was twig-like hands with thousands of fingers.
I think there is something to just letting them be, putting the materials before them without any timidity or judgement.
(My own art teacher mom banned coloring books for me-- something about not having to deal with someone else's notion of what things looked like. Plus, we played that Harry Chapin song over and over again about some little boy who was punished for not coloring the flowers properly like the teacher wanted.)
And yet....I came across the greatest book in a used bookstore last spring-- Drawing With Children by Mona Brookes. It reminded me of one of Mom's favorites-- Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain-- that she used with her students.
Drawing With Children is wonderful in that it breaks down seeing and drawing into small exercises that come off more as play than instruction. Theo and I are already cobbling together these lessons and my goal is to somehow, even with Josephine, balance the freedom with the practice of art.
In the end, for all of us, I think it is about seeing, noticing what is around you in the world. And in that my children are often better than I am, fascinated by the most ordinary of things.

