I was playing with one of Ava’s new toys this weekend on our trip to Decorah. It’s a magnetic drawing pad, something like an Etch-A-Sketch with a pen attached to it. After Ava took a shine to scribbling all over our hardwood floors with her Crayons, Leah figured it might be a good idea to get her something a little less destructive.
Since we’ve had the toy, I’ve begun to rediscover my inner artist. Kinda. Actually, my inner artist is probably a shriveled up little man hunched somewhere way down deep in my soul with a worn-down nib of a pencil grasped loosely in his (left) hand.
It could be that artistic ability skips from one family member to the next. My dad’s one of those people who could faithfully recreate Picasso’s Guernica from memory using only a soiled napkin and a lump of graphite. My younger brother returned from a trip to Italy and environs with beautifully detailed charcoal-on-paper renderings he’d done of the ruins in and around Rome. They both have the ability to translate what their eyes see into movements their hands make. Well, it’s more than that, really. I can draw a circle or a square or even a fairly accurate city bus, if I’m pressed. What they have that I don’t is an artistic sensibility. A style. My circles all come out looking like circles, while theirs look like something more than just a ring sitting there on the page. Even the simplest shapes rendered by them take on a depth that’s greater than the shape itself would normally convey.
For the last couple years I’ve toyed on and off with the idea of buying a drawing pad and some nice charcoal pencils to see if I can coax some latent ability out of these rusty genes. Even better than dead tech pencils and paper would be a Graphire tablet from Wacom. But $200?! “Add to Wish List.”
I believe that giving Ava the opportunity to see her parents doing creative things will engender in her an appreciation at least of creativity, if not of those particular things we do. She already seems to love watching a long, thin line trail from the tip of her Crayon as she drags it across a page. Maybe the talent in my father and brother has skipped me and found a home in her. There are worse genetic gifts.