A Narwhal!

P helped me make tortillas for dinner tonight. Homemade tortillas are so yummy, but I haven't made them since P was born! We made extra dough so the kid could fulfill his flour fetish. After rolling most of them out for me he asked to keep two balls to play with. He then busied himself with shapes, stories and questions while I cooked the tortillas. Then, "Mama! Look! What's this?" Ummm, I hate these kind of questions because I never know the Right answer. Adding a level of difficulty to such a question is the fact that art-wise I've really followed the hints in the book "Young at Art." Research shows that letting children operate abstractly (artistically, at least) during their youth helps them in numerous ways. So P has never been shown a smiley face or had a paper plate made into a gawd awful turkey. And therefore he rarely copies animals into clay or faces into chalk. He just scribbles and discovers texture, form, shape etc. And his work Looks pretty abstract :) So tonight I turned to see a large, longish blob, dotted with tiny holes to achieve a polka dot look, finished with a toothpick stuck in one end. "Gee, honey, umm..." And he saved me. "A Narwhal Mama!!" And I think this was the first time his figurative art achieved its goal - it actually looked like the animal named. Then I had to chuckle that a wacky creature like a narwhal was his first figurative sculpture :)