I’ll stop short of being crazy braggart mom and won’t proclaim Little Boy the next Claude Monet, but we have definitely detected an artistic bent in this 5 year-old. Drawing is his favorite pastime (aside from Legos and the all-too-limited television allotment), and he shows infinite patience — indeed, almost an obsessiveness. He likes copying drawings, and is particularly picky about colors. To nurse these interest, lately we’ve been taking Little Boy to museums, armed with a sketchpad to allow him to copy the old masters with his own voice.
In the past week, we’ve been twice to the MFA in Boston (twice because the tickets are good for ten days, and the tickets for 2 adults cost $50, and we are cheap) and the Harvard Natural History Museum (free to Mass residents on Sunday mornings!) Each time, he’s shown great enthusiasm –again, obsessiveness — for sketching masks, paintings, contemporary art, and stuffed wild boar. Although his renderings are, from a technical perspective, typical of a 5 year old, I can tell his observation powers are growing, and it’s something he enjoys immensely.
(I’m glad we’re fulfilling my New Year’s Resolution to go to more museums, but on a darker note, I’ve had to interpret scores of European paintings to him featuring unpleasant allegories. “And that old man over there, the one with the wings, that’s Death. He’s grabbing the woman because she’s Truth, and Truth is not as strong as Death.”)
Sketching...
...sketching...
...smiling!
Hard at work!
