Both children have the most charming creative style. They like to have, at all times, paper on their easels, and they like to let me know when it’s time to refresh the canvas. So I clamp a piece of paper onto the easel, and the kids do all the rest.
While I’m on the phone in the studio, Ford is kneeling on the floor before his easel, oil crayon in hand, gracefully weaving arabesques onto white paper like a dancer, partly like an experienced surgeon. He amazes me with his consistency and experimentation. At his age, I was drawing pure representation: rooms and school buses and horses, familiar things. Ford, thirty years later, has the same hair and chin, but the picture is completely different. He fills the page, works at will, picks up where he leaves off, whenever he chooses. One piece may hang, awaiting completion, for three days. He will flit back into the mudroom when I take a break to read mail, and will deliberately choose a medium, often something new that week, and experiment with the flow of the material on paper, the texture of its friction. Sometimes, he’ll add a Dalek, or a robot, or some other recognizable icon of current obsession.
Here, a Dalek for sure:
His abstract, expressionistic style has remainded consistent since he began making collages, at 18 months. Then, we used to sit at the dinette in the airstream, paper on the table and both weilding glue sticks. I’d ask him where this piece of torn paper wanted to go? Where does that piece belong? Do you think it belongs on the paper? Like conversation, documented in layers and textures, and I’ll remember this with a certain piognancy, as I remember his first steps (which he took in the same trailer!)
Chas is the same. Whether he has taken cues from Ford or not, he is also uninhibited. But while Ford’s marks bear a signature pattern, Chas’ style is vigorously expressive in one moment, exquisitely drawn in another. His hand bears dramatic pressure here, a faint scrawl there. Many times, lately, he is drawing something important to him, something concrete. A sea anemone, for example:
I look at them and grin, thinking to myself that it couldn’t get any better than this. It’s one of my most passionate goals, taht they retain this sense of urgency to create, to be free with their ability, uninhibited by convention. We will always keep a space for them, wherever we are, where their mind can pause (with or without the castaway shoes and fallen markers) and play with materials at hand.
I wish this for you, too. 🙂
