Shortly after my granddaughter started spending time with me at 6½ weeks, I put cartoon drawings of her toys on the wall so she’d have something fun and familiar to look at. Her verbal skills grew rapidly and her toys changed, too. Now, at 4½ years, and way past Tinky Winky and Dipsy, she agreed to take most of the old drawings down and put up new ones. (She didn’t want to part with Sophey or Pout-Pout Fish, so they moved to a different wall.) She wants to fill another wall in the kitchen, too. Since her arrival, I’d hung framed pictures that her mother drew on wainscotting in the kitchen- all just two feet up- right about toddling height. Now we covered the wall above the wainscotting with her pictures and she wants to cover another wall with zoo animals. I’m loving it.
First she challenged me to draw the Nittany lion. We drew head to head, with her version winning in the end. The next afternoon she drew a regular lion. I called it an African lion but she said no- it’s a Pennsylvania lion. That’s when she arrived at the ‘zoo animal’ theme. Her elephant blew mine away, and she insisted it was an elephant, not a heffalump. She drew others without challenging me: a fantastic giraffe, a monkey “with some leaves to hold on to”, a tiger. All fun stuff, and all hanging in the kitchen.
And really, no presentation is complete without a signed self portrait of the artist as a young girl. In teddy bear pajamas. And Minnie the Mouse slippers.
