The Pint-casso in our Family

I have never been much of an artist. All the sculptures I made in middle school, many of which my mom is still saving, were angular and geometric--and not that attractive. Most were painted in simple, primary colors or fired with a single hue of glaze. In kindergarten, when my classmates were going wild on their bonnets for our Easter parade, adorning them with basketfuls of Easter grass and tiny bunnies and chicks, I festooned my plain white woven hat with a single bright pink rose, ignoring my teacher's coaxing to get a little more creative. I guess I was a minimalist from birth.

That's why, despite my beloved's excellent eye for photography, I'm a little surprised by the tremendous attention our daughter, at nearly three, pays to art projects. I figured my inability would trump any artistic aptitude of his, genetically speaking. But it doesn't appear to have done so.

This girl once spent a focused hour painting My Little Pony pictures with one of those rectangular white plastic palettes. And she painted in the lines and with a wide range of colors.

In school, she's equally intense. She and her cohorts began a couple of weeks ago to create a series of animals to decorate their room. They started with paper-plate lions with construction paper-strip manes. The strips were naturally pre-cut, but the glueing was in the tots' hands following a demo by the teachers.

When I arrived to pick my cherub up that afternoon, I was escorted to the wall of felines by Miss A. and asked if I could guess which lion was my girl's. I scanned the menagerie, spotting quite a number of cats who looked like they could use a touch of Rogaine (Roar-gaine?). And then my eyes fell on a lion with a gloriously full and tastefully multi-hued mane which was carefully arranged around its face.

"Yes, that's the one," said Miss A. "She really surprises us with her art."

She really surprises me, too. The last couple of days, she's been into making "cards" for her papa. These consist of a sheet of drawing paper crowded with stickers. While working on one yesterday, she accidentally tore one of the stickers in half and went hunting in the art cupboard for some Elmer's glue to remedy the situation.

That glue provided the inspiration for a new media, I discovered this afternoon as I was summoning the troops for our walk to a neighbor's summer solstice celebration. When I found her, she was sitting on the dining room floor with the bottle of white, sticky stuff, adhering colored pencils (pointy at both ends from big brother's sharpening phase a couple of months ago) to the aforementioned drawing paper.

"I can't leave yet," she said. "I'm making another card for Daddy."

Look out, Jackson Pollack and Andy Warhol. We've got a budding modernist on our hands.