Art or “Hey, someone puked a rainbow”
Art at School
So everyone encourages their kids to do art. I mean, even if you don’t give a crap about their ability to hold a pencil one day or care about encouraging creativity then you want to do it just to get them out of your hair for a while. It’s heartwarming, really. Your kid sitting busy at a table and not ripping your current reading material to shreds or calmly eating the entire box of Godiva truffles or whatever else they do quietly. (What, your kids never did anything like that?)
Later, they run up to you and show you what they did. They’re proud. It’s so cute. Cutecutecute. Whatever that green scribble is, they did it. And they say they did it for you. Awwwwww…..
Then, they want you to hang it up. Hang something on the wall once and you are stuck doing this forever.
***We use art “clotheslines” for the newest productions (until the kids forget about them and we can take them down). You can buy pretty versions of them at Land of Nod, or just make your own, since it’s really simple. I made two lines across the front of the built-in bookcases out of some rope I bought at Target, some adhesive wall mounted knobs at each end and some small 2″ clothespins. I decorated the clothespins with glued on flat wood flower and butterfly beads and put a few other wood beads on the line itself just to enliven empty lines. The only thing to remember is that adhesive wall hooks have a weight limit so don’t try to pack on the picts. I’ve also seen some nice modern takes on this using Ikea wire curtain things.***
After an intensive nine months or so of fostering all their artistic ambitions we ended up with about 3 or 4 baskets of art work. Good sized baskets. Stuck under the coffee table. And in the bookcase. And next to the never-used-again fireplace. I recently read some articles about what people do with their kid’s old artwork (I’d link it but I can’t find it). Some people immediately recycle them all. Some people keep them until their kids have kids. Some people display them until they come up with a new crop. What do I do? Obviously, I’m a hoarder, but I’m trying to reform. I went through them all in one night (it’s not really that hard to do) and sorted them into Recycle, Keep for Gift(wrap)s, and These Might Be Art.
A short note about “These Might Be Art”: Okay, so I’m probably utterly deluded. But Z’s got such a great combination of colors on these paintings… I used to be pleased with my own art efforts in school but I did mostly black and white, not color. A’s paintings and drawings are more minimalist, but sometimes they have this sort of Japanese calligraphy/ ink blot thing going. She also did this pretty damn good likeness of Cookie Monster that’s recognizable from across the room, even though I am about positive it’s actually just a big blue spiky splat.
So what am I planning on doing with these favorites of mine? Well, frame it, okay? I want to do an art wall for my kids. But.. rather than continuously add frames to the wall until it falls down and kills us all with glass shards in the next earthquake I wanted something made to accommodate change. Ideally it would be something that would stay mounted on the wall while I did this. Maybe once a year or once a season or something. ***A quick search and I found this: Lil Davinci Art Cabinets. I have high hopes for this product since the reviews at Amazon are almost uniformly good. And they hold a lot of art, sort of like an art Pez dispenser. You can put new ones in front of old ones just by opening the frame and mashing them in. Sounds good to me! (Although the name is sort of embarrassing.) ***
I’ll put up a picture when I get it shipped to me. And I find time to put them on the wall… by myself (“Dear Husband” does not do these things).
Promise.
** No one is paying me for mentioning their product or for saying nice things. I wish they would.**
(The astericks** don’t really mean anything except that I’m diverging from my random narrative to explain)
9/27/12 Edit: Wow! They’re here already! They came in 2 days! Too bad I’m not ready to put them up.
10/2/12 Edit: I am an idiot! I thought they were painting on 8.5″x11″ but all their stuff is on 9″x12″! I’m going to have to sit in the living room with a paper cutter and chop everything down to fit the frames! Or…I could buy some 9″x12″s and not tell…
10/3/12 Edit: Got the new frames. Only got half the number of necessary frames. Will cut down some but keep the larger frames for those I can’t bear to chop up. heh heh.