Baby Art

How I love that little dude. Maybe I'm just a proud father who happens to know a lot about painting materials. No matter, I find the following to be true: Children's artwork is remarkable. As an abstraction, nothing compares to scribblings. Was Jackson Pollock really conscious of his marks? Could he really separate himself from his creation or was he concerned with composition? Who cares, his works' worth millions and my son makes scribblings. But there is something to say for scribblings of a toddler, there was no concern for composition in the creation of my son's work. There was no years of art school telling my son what marks and colors were acceptable and which were not. There was no decades of television, magazines, newspapers, billboards, mail, T-shirts, books, or the opinions of others to influence my son's scribblings. The only influence my son had to make his work was that the panel, like the wall (ugh!), was white. As an artist, my work will never and can never be as pure.

You want more, meet me at the bar and I'll talk about the minimalists and their relationship to my son's scribblings. I'd tell you that my son is a master at abstraction and a master minimalist, and he's loosing his skill everyday he is alive just like the rest of us. But that's a better conversation over a beer.