This is not Emily’s drawing, but another child’s. We think he was reading Orwell.
One afternoon in the mid-1970s, while minding my small daughter, I read to her Charles Lamb’s “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig” (1823) at nap time. I left Emily to fall asleep in her bed or do whatever she did when I thought she was napping.
Lamb exaggerated the high-handed style of the early nineteenth century for effect as he described houses being set afire, with pigs inside, by louts with names like Bo-bo. Lamb was spoofing TV cooking shows two centuries before they happened. He was telling readers how mankind might have stumbled upon roast pork. You watch the cooking shows on television. Is it hard to imagine one promoting cooking succulent pig “the easy, quick way”? All you need is a second home.
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As a young father, master of a tiny universe, I busied myself with whatever masters of tiny universes did when young mothers were away. Now, I’m told, fathers vacuum the house, tidy the kitchen, make lists for grocery shopping, and contribute to the family weal in ways that are no longer considered remarkable. I did none of those things. Different time. Entirely.
After sufficient time had passed for my daughter to have taken a nap, she found me. She was holding a drawing she’d done on a piece of copy paper.
“I made this for you,” she said.
Emily’s artistic rendering of Lamb’s essay was unforced, unbidden, unexpected. She had listened to a story I thought she might like but not understand. Masters of tiny universes are often wrong in their assumptions.
My daughter had drawn a green, board-and-batten cottage sprouting red flames. A figure that is likely the child arsonist Bo-bo watches the conflagration with a spared pig. Bo-bo is smiling. The pig appears dumbstruck at the indifference of the delinquent Bo-bo to the pigs roasting inside his family’s house.
She had listened to a story I thought she might like but not understand. Masters of tiny universes are often wrong in their assumptions.
My wife and I watched our children’s art progress from works unfettered and untutored with wild themes and even wilder colors to efforts beaten senseless by school art class and comparison to the art of peers. Some public schools solved this dilemma by eliminating art class.
Now, as our children move into middle-age (if you don’t believe it, look at me), they use art to amuse themselves (my daughter) or in their work. (My son, Michael, draws pictures of landscapes before bringing them to life.)
I could bemoan the lost art of childhood, indeed the loss of childhood. Instead, I will recall taking tea the other afternoon with my friend, Tiffanie, a standup comedian who makes her living as an art therapist. I listened as the art therapist said a child’s approach to art needn’t be squelched. Teachers and parents should encourage process over product. Appreciate the movement in a pre-schooler’s art. In other words, don’t try to make the trees look like trees.
“Draw what you see, instead of what it really looks like,” Tiffanie said. “Let the eye finish. Don’t get so caught up in detail that you lose the form.”
She was paraphrasing the utterances of people who write books about the art of children. To her credit, Tiffanie knows the terms that apply to art made by children but does not use them, terms like pre-schematic and schematic, gang stage, pseudo-naturalistic and, my favorite and therefore placed in all capital letters: “THE PERIOD OF DECISION.”
There is also the cephalopod phase—that is, the drawing of large round heads with stick appendages.
My art tutelage may not have led to my children’s becoming the next Mary Cassatt or Edward Hopper, but I did read to them the books they brought to nap time. I managed to sneak in stories by Lamb, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck (The Red Pony) and William Saroyan (The Human Comedy). The children tolerated me, knowing my mind would soon skate on to other things—bicycle repair, popping corn or, once my wife returned, working in the garden.
I didn’t try to change the way my children drew. I marveled at their interpretations of the ordinary. Nor did I try to shape their thinking with the books and stories I read to them. Their art and thinking would be challenged soon enough in the big universe outside the tiny universe of a safe house, rooms of their own, access to paper and crayons, and shelves crammed with books.
Ed Cullen’s wry observations on life in South Louisiana will be familiar to readers of The Advocate, where he worked for forty years. Letter in a Woodpile, a collection of his newspaper and radio essays, was published in 2006.
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