Making and Loving Art

One of Lola's friends loves art. Like really LOVES it. She spends hours drawing, and coloring, and painting each day, and when her mom said that she was signing her up for a week-long painting class through the parks & rec department, I decided to sign up Lola too. 

Lola, like most little ones, has a very active imagination and a creative side to her. I kind of believe that we all must start out like this, as I rarely seem to meet a kid that doesn't care for some sort of art activity.  I think what happens is that as we age, we don't nurture that part of ourselves and eventually, for many people, the creativity dissipates or at least gets trapped behind all of the other things that we feel are more important.

Before Lola was born, Josh and I talked about how we wanted our child to find both an art and a physical activity that she loved.  My thought is that it's important to exercise the mind and the body.  For the most part she completes loads of paintings and drawings at preschool (most of which look like stick people or stick dogs or rainbows), but given that she is on summer break, we wanted her to have an outlet other than our typical coloring book time at home. 

When Josh dropped her off at her first painting class, he came home and told me, "I don't know if this class is going to work out."  When I asked him why, he said, "The teacher is a bit rigid.  This isn't going to be a class where they just paint whatever they want.  She was instructing the kids on how to exactly paint a basket of flowers."  The look on his face mirrored my feeling that we both knew drawing a basket of flowers was outside of Lola's typical stick person/dog routine.  But, we both acknowledged that the description in the parks catalog said that the kids would learn the difference between Matisse and Seurat.  (At the time, we thought that was a joke since the class was for 4 to 6 year-olds.)

When Josh picked her up, she handed him a painting of, you guessed it, a basket of flowers.  And it LOOKED like a basket of flowers.  The next day she brought home a painting of six birds on a branch, then a teddy bear (in which she used some sort of texture technique to create his fur), and then a house set against a nice background.  But, most importantly, each day Lola came home happily chatting about the things she learned and the art she created.

The same teacher is offering a week-long drawing class in August. I think we will be signing Miss L up for that one too.