The artist is clearly trying to convey a certain inner turmoil through this piece. Look at the bold use of colour and the angry brush strokes. It’s quite a departure from his usual style which has a more calm and measured approach.”
The artist is in one of the most prolific phases of his young career. Papers are strewn across the room, nothing must be touched or moved even an inch, lest his creative fugue is disturbed. We watch from the sidelines, awed by the seemingly limitless ideas that spurt forth. There is an octopus atop an apartment complex watering his plants. Here is a house with a tree growing out of its roof. And that… well that can be best described as paints smooshed to resemble a mosh pit of fear.
It’s a rather wonderful thing to see a young child discover his/her inner artist. As a parent you cannot help but marvel at their talent, nod vigorously at the large misshapen blob your 3-year-old insists is a portrait of his brother. “The eyes are just spot on” you gush. Well, spot on, if your newborn is a myopic raisin. But parents are blinded by love. You begin to collect the art, thinking that this might be worth something some day when your child is hailed as the next Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst. Soon an entire binder is bursting at the seams with their creations. Their fledgling attempts at discovering their oeuvre are aided by teachers at pre school who introduce them to new media — cotton wool, q-tips and new techniques: who knew paper crumpling could lead to such texture?
I observe my friends going through these initial stages with indulgent amusement. Their once pristine fridge door turned into a gallery wall. Parenting forums I’m on are littered with the question ‘What do you do with your children’s art work? How do you store it?”
Eight years into this gig and I’ll tell you what to do… you throw it away! Formal education is a long affair. Assuming that the art works will come streaming in with alarming regularity till the powers that be decide it’s time to focus on permutations instead of pointillism, you’re looking at enough art to fill the Louvre and all it’s storage vaults. And let’s be honest, it’s not all good. Unless your child is that 5-year-old on Facebook who can recreate Rembrandt paintings with their non-toxic jumbo crayons you can throw most of their ‘early work’ away.
The best advice I ever got from another parent (whose son was at the Rhode Island School of Design, and so actually talented) was this: Pick one, at the most two pieces to save from each term of school, and file them.
The rest can be thrown away without guilt. Of course, if you have the time, you could scan each and every piece of work and store it on an external hard drive for posterity. Personally, I find putting things in the trash less time consuming. Though, do wait a few months to do the discarding. There’s nothing worse than a five year old discovering at 5:30 am on a Sunday that his triptych of Darth Vader conquering Mars is missing. I should know.
(The writer’s parenting philosophy is: if there’s no blood, don’t call me)