Art week

Sometime during my cousin's visit with us, she mentioned wanting to get back to more art in her life, and we talked about how we wished we did more creative things as kids. And I remembered that A loves painting at daycare, and that I hadn't yet broken out the watercolors I bought her a few months ago. So there we were, the whole family, sitting at the dining room table, painting.

From the fingerprints series. My cousin L, the interior designer, has always said that A has a great sense of color. I agree. Just wait, it gets better.

L and I agree, we're not so enamored of water color painting. It's hard. Not to overlap colors, to get the right thickness or watery-ness of paint, is not easy. And, although I can pencil-sketch the heck out of a portrait, I'm no color expert. Color is my weakness. Luckily, my child is a natural, and has been putting together great color mixes since she started mixing Lego Duplo blocks into towers.

I'm a better copier than "out of thin air" artist, so I started pulling out some art books from our shelves. M found a book of O'Keefe watercolors and we looked at it a few evenings ago with A on the balcony. We talked about the colors with her, and talked about what different paintings could be of.

At that night's painting session (which M was in on, too - we are officially water coloring fools over here in Switzerland, at our house), I mixed a bit of purple up, and check out what my kid produced, yet again, with no input from me. Suddenly, she's filling up the paper, horizontally.

That's my kid's painting. You can tell because it has an interesting combination of colors. If I was going to push this whole point, I'd call this her landscapes period. If I was going to obnoxious about it, I'd call it her "young O'Keefe" stage. 

Art week has been a lot of fun. I hope we do it again soon.