we painted!

At long last, I shoved my inexplicable fear of painting aside, and broke out the paint boards, water color paper and brushes, got the kids smocked-up, and got us painting!

Other than being entirely out of my element (I mean, we're using REAL professional-quality materials -- and what do I know about art?? Like, um, NOTHING), I was also worried about all the imaginary problems I could see crop up. Like my kids' find motor skills not being where they needed to be to handle the washing and care of the brush. Or them following my lead too closely, or actually painting pictures of something. Enki wet-on-wet watercolor painting at the Kindergarten level is about experiencing the colors and the way they move on the paper. I fully expected that J would sit down and paint a flower rather than sinking into the experience the way we want kids to. And that thought right there caused me to almost hyperventilate whenever I even thought about pulling out the paints (which I of course bought last summer and have since sat neatly wrapped on a shelf).

Imagine my surpise when both of my kids instantly settled in and began experimenting with color and movement! I painted slowly nearby on my own paper, reading a few paragraphs from an Enki story written to help children with the care of their paintbrush. The white bird in the story dips her tail (dip, dip, dip) into the magic water, picks up a color, flies through the sky with it, painting all below her with that color, then flies to a plain pool and swish, swish, swish, washes her tail clean. Zoo Boy dipped his brush into the paint. "Dip, dip, dip" he said softly to himself. He moved the brush across the paper leaving yellow streaks. "Swish, swish, swish" he chanted softly as he swirled his brush in the water to clean it off, then wiped it dry on his cloth before dipping it back into the paint for more color. He accidentally splattered a drop of paint onto his paper, and squealed with delight "Mommy, come look! The color is moving!" He purposefully splatter on more drops, then cleaned his brush before picking up a different color to try the splattering. "Oooh, look now!" he whispered, having laid the brush bristles against the paper and held them there, watching the color bleed out. "Can you pass me the blue paint, please?"

And here's Zoo Boy's final painting. This child, the same one who thinks a drawing is one crayon line in the middle of a page, filled nearly 75% of his paper with color. And was really pleased with the results, he couldn't wait to show The Map Man. "I never painted before, " he sighed contentedly after he was finished and was working at unbottoning his smock. I suggested that maybe we could do it again next week. "Oh, yes!" he smiled. "Oh, yes."

As for J, the child who has been doing representational drawing ever since he first picked up a crayon at 18 mos of age, the child who has never scribbled or made a disorganized mark on any surface, the child who just last week sculpted a to-scale model of the human digestive system out of playdoh, today created this masterpiece of color and abstractedness. He never once tried to "make something" out of it. He painted for the pure experience of the color and rhythm of his brush on the paper. It was truly one of those magical childhood moments -- something I'll never forget as long as I live. At one point, he looked over at what I was doing, and I had a momentary flash of panic that maybe he was thinking he should be copying what I was doing. It passed quickly when he smiled and said "that's really beautiful, Mommy!" and went back to his own discovery process.

And, just because I know some wiseguy in the comments section is going to ask where my painting is if I don't include it, here's my creation. Compared to my kids' free romp through the rainbow, mine is a bit conservative. I felt "done" with mine a half hour before the kids started wrapping up theirs. And in the end, I like theirs better. But for a woman who long ago was convinced she needed a class or formal lessons in order to be able to even try anything new, I was pretty proud at my first attempt at painting. And I was even prouder that I overcame my fear of trying, so that (hopefully) my children are never paralyzed by that same fear.

Oh yeah, we are definitely painting again next week!