What My 4-Year Taught Me About Seeing Things Through
I rarely tell people this, and they don’t know unless they visit my home in the States, but I’m a closet artist.
I go through yearly phases where I do like 15-20 paintings in a month, and then I stop.
The reason being, I’m extremely self-critical of my artwork. I can only do it in short spurts before I begin to drive myself crazy with criticism.
But my daughter… she’s a real Matisse in training.
She has an admirable artists knack for turning scars into stars. So I really encourage this gift she has.
I recently bought her a book called Drawing Christmas.
As the title suggests, it shows kids how to draw specific Christmas pictures like reindeer, Santa Claus, angels, etc. Nice little book, BTW.
Every evening we’ve been working on a new holiday picture, to hang on the wall. Yesterday we did the reindeers.
In order to complete it, she had to cut up a sponge in the shape of the reindeers body… dip it in some paint… stamp the paint onto paper… then fill in the antlers, tail, etc.
Anyway, when she started stamping these lavender reindeer bodies all over the construction paper, I thought it looked a little crazy.
The paint was kind of bubbly from the sponge. The heads were stamped on really willy-nilly. And it just didn’t look like it was going to turn out well.
But a nice thing happened.
With each completed step, the picture became more and more beautiful.
And when it dried, it was really awesome. So much more than I expected it to be.
The experience made me think about how New Project Addicts tend to feel when we’re working on something.
We look at a project that we’ve been tinkering with, and once that honeymoon feeling wears off, it looks ugly. We see a million and one flaws demonstrating why we shouldn’t continue.
But if we just work towards completion, the masterpiece finally emerges. We see the flowers bloom, and realize the work was genuinely worth it.
The only way you see that brilliance is when you actually complete what you start.
Takin’ it one project at a time,
Alexis Dawes
