Unlearning My Creativity
I love art, craft and all things creative and most of my free time is spent in artsy stuff. Unlike typical artists who love the unorganised environs, I am all for planning and organising. When the universe conspired to throw in an energetic pre-schooler in my organised artsy world, one can only guess the resulting riot. With my son very much being my partner in creativity, a few things he made me unlearn in our artsy journey.
It’s all in the genes : It’s just natural. I expected my offspring to inherit my arty genes in plenty from day 1. Well! I was in bit of a shock when he didn’t touch a crayon till he was about 2, to the point that I was literally prying open his tiny palms and shoving in few crayons to get him to draw. But all he was interested in was planes and drumming. That the paternal genes popped up and dominated before mine, was like one tight slap. I guess someone up there took pity on my daily ranting and decided to give a strong nudge to my set of genes and voila my little artist was born!
Mess is the best : One is never prepared for the mess that is an appendage to motherhood. Unused to the mess in my work space, nothing prepared me for the tsunami of mess that literally hit the walls and floor of my house. For my son it was all about throwing, splashing, feeling and printing tubes of colours. It took me a while to surface from the tsunami but when I saw the fun and beauty of the outcome, I became a bigger contributor.
Colouring within lines is passé : Like any good mother my first task was to teach him to colour within lines. It was banished in a day and he refused to follow conventional methods of drawing and painting. He disliked the conventional books that taught how to copy and colour the pictures and never so much as scribbled a crayon on them. All of them got shoved into the furthest recess of his book shelf. My husband’s take on it is, ‘all our lives we teach them to colour within the lines and then in the real world the paintings that fetch millions are the ones coloured outside the lines, so we may have a winner already!’ Yeah right!
All things must be coloured : From paper to fabric to plastic to steel utensils all forms just had to get a dash of paint or a squiggle of planes, trains and sun. Nothing was spared, not even my paintings and murals. His signature, it must have!
Tools with an edge : A paint brush is used only in dire circumstances, when the fork, spoon, hands, pen tips, pencil stubs and combs are caked in dried paint and beg for a wash.
Coloured paper in a jiffy : Need red coloured paper? In a jiffy – just splash red coloured water from previous art work on to the paper, dry out on sand and there it is textured coloured paper!
My carefully constructed organised world of art has been completely mowed down by the little tyke, but he has made me see the world in a different hue – literally!
A teacher to children with challenges by profession, Maya is an artist by passion. In her free time she dabbles in art with her preschooler son. You can follow their arty journey on artwithp.wordpress.com