Our granddaughter Isabelle loves to paint. She’ll be three years old in late February, and seems to have gravitated to making art. Unconstrained by matters of self-criticism, perfectionism, or rules of any kind, her work is completely expressive, uninhibited and spontaneous. Watching her playfulness reminds me of how tight and inhibited I am, and as usual, she’s teaching me about joy.
A recent painting began with pink. “It’s a bird,” she said, pulling the brush right and left to make wings. “Here’s the head,” and she worked the brush into a tight circle of color. “Let’s use green!” she exclaimed, so we washed the brush and opened the jar of green poster paint. Isabelle began covering the pink bird with green paint, smearing it right and left and up and down until the area was completely covered green. “What happened to the bird?” I asked. “It turned into a friendly monster,” she pronounced, smiling broadly.
Over time she covered half the sheet, painting over the green with blue, and adding black and yellow at the edges. She used the brush delicately to bring the paint right to one corner of the paper. “Ok, done,” she announced, and that was it. Later, when she told her mom what she had painted, the story remained. “I painted a bird that turned into a friendly monster,” she said proudly.
Every time Isabelle paints, she experiments. At times she keeps the brush wet and boldly washes broad strokes of cloud-like color across the paper. At other times, she just touches the tip of the brush against the paper and lightly dabs bright bold spots of thick paint. She puts colors next to each other, over each other, and mixed with each other. For her, it’s about how painting feels not just how it looks, and as she suddenly shifts to making a long, rounded line I can feel her joy as she creates her world. Jackson Pollock, the renowned abstract expressionist, would understand completely.
For Isabelle, the world is a magical place, unfettered by constraints. With word and gesture, she finds the world itself her playmate; an interesting leaf, a mud puddle, petting a dog, the sound of wind in the trees, cheese on a tortilla, wearing a “hoodie,” eating soup, making green friendly monsters with paint. Nothing is excluded – everything simply appears as it is. In time, of course, this will change. She will be told by others what is good and bad, pretty and ugly, right and wrong; slowly her playful innocence will give way to self-criticism. I hope she will not be swept up in conformity, and I will encourage her confidence in her own basic goodness and that of the world.
I’m not sure when my own artwork tightened up. I too, as a child, loved to paint. At some point in my teens, I began to judge myself too harshly and lost confidence. Self-consciousness began to creep in, and the joy of pure expression began to fade. Though I still love to draw, I’m very careful, not bold or daring like Isabelle, and she’s made me realize, as she so often does that I can relax, loosen up and be more playful.
This is one of the great blessings of being a grandparent, reconnecting with the wisdom of play.
