Picture Not Quite Perfect?
By Glinda
Ahhh, who doesn’t love art?
Certainly not this museum-loving gal, who has been known to just sit and stare at paintings and sculptures in complete awe.
As any mother of a preschool-aged child can tell you, your exposure to art increases tenfold once the kid learns how to hold any type of writing/coloring instrument. It starts first with adorable little squiggles, which you praise highly in order to reinforce the idea that creating art is a good thing. And also to encourage the perfection of that grip upon the writing instrument.
So then your child gets the idea that everything they do is this fantabulous piece de resistance that needs to be displayed on the wall or the refrigerator. Well, at least mine did.
Therein lies the quandry. Whither all that art?
I know some moms who have kept practically everything their child has created, whether it took 30 seconds or 20 minutes.
And those moms have also seriously thought about renting extra storage space to hold it all.
Would it be so bad to tell the child that the hastily scribbled “rainbow” does not even compare with the very detailed treasure map and that they are indeed not equal in execution or result?
After some heavy pondering and surreptitious dumping of artwork while the Munchkin was asleep, I decided to involve him in the process. This was for two reasons, the first being that I felt horribly guilty putting his drawings in the trash as well as the desire for my vacuum to not get crowded out of the hallway closet.
The other day we were cleaning out the car, which becomes an involuntary repository of all the school art projects, and I allowed him to pick the items he wanted me to keep and which ones were not worthy of immortality.
And wouldn’t you know, for the most part he chose the projects that were thematic and time-consuming to produce.
Now, if only I could get his permission to ditch the highly unflattering portrait he made of me for Mother’s Day last year in which he proclaimed I was 100 years old, all would be good.
March 11th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Lucky for you that you have a child who is willing to consider throwing stuff out! No such luck in our house, so for years I had to resort to stealth culling of the collection when they were not around. It’s just impossible to keep all of it – by the end of grade school you’ll have enough for landfill.
March 11th, 2008 at 11:35 am
I would have culled as a child, honestly. It became a source of strange amusement to me that a ‘masterpiece’ I was directed to make in first grade out of a cottage cheese tub lid with macaroni and little pine cones glued to it and spraypainted gold wound up hanging just outside my parents’ bedroom for the rest of their lives.
When my father died and my brothers and I were clearing out the house, that cottage cheese lid finally went to its well-earned eternal rest, too.
To this day I have no idea why that one thing stayed hung up on the wall all those years.
March 11th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
That’s a great story, Twistie. Maybe they just liked to see it and say to themselves “We’re parents; see what we endure?”
For two-dimensional art, there are always scanners. That’s what I’d do, and I’m a notorious packrat. There are preschoolers who have blogs just for their artwork, and as long as you supervise them, that’s a great way to memorialize their artistic triumphs.
March 16th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
[...] Glinda… So then your child gets the idea that everything they do is this fantabulous piece de resistance that needs to be displayed on the wall or the refrigerator. [...]
March 16th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
There is a simple and very neat solution: take a digital picture of each “masterpiece” and store it electronically. Then, once the art has been replaced by the new “masterpiece”, recycle it. You’ve have a wonderful image of the good stuff and cleaner closets.
March 16th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
I still would like to keep some of it, you know?
It just doesn’t have the same impact if you can’t “see” it in person, IMHO.