Le artiste

While visiting Thom and Katie, I was treated to a whole stack of artwork from Sefton. Apparently at four years old, he’s found his passion in drawing, and he literally goes through page after page (from a ream of paper on his little art desk) with scribbles and drawings and messages. It’s fun to have him describe his works. For example, here’s one he gave me after his dad and I returned from our backpacking trip:

He told me the yellow line with the little yellow dots is a beach with sand, and of course the blue line at the bottom is a lake (Thom and I had told him we were going to be camping beside a lake). The grey circles are rocks along the shoreline, and the yellow man is throwing one of the rocks into the lake– hence the curved lines showing its trajectory, and the splash of blue. There are also two trees, one of which (in the center) has a spider in his web. The red blobs in the sky are clouds, which naturally turn red near sunset, especially from the recent smoke in the area. The little M’s are birds, as every child artist knows. I asked him if he’d sign his work in the lower right corner, so I’d know who drew it, but he just laughed uproariously as he signed his name in the upper left corner. Katie says he’s going through a bit of a contrarian phase, so any time you ask him for something, he’ll sort of give it to you, but not in the way you ask. He thinks it’s hilarious.

So yeah, it’s fun to have a budding artist in the family. I’m not quite sure what Thom and Katie are going to do with the literally hundreds of drawings he’s made for them, but this one is just for me.