10 Apr How one mother handled her kids Creative and Remarkable Art Projects (CRAP)
Lucinda Bertram tries to deal tactfully with her daughters’ prolific artistic output.
“Oh, it’s lovely,” I hear myself saying as, yet again, my daughter walks proudly towards me at the end of the preschool day, holding a mountain of biscuit and tissue boxes glued together. “It’s a submarine, Mummy, and everyone loves it,” Alice assures me.
Other mothers give me looks of sympathy, while some openly giggle – probably because they recognise that I’m carting home the rubbish that they donated to the preschool.
Both of my daughters are prolific, creative artists, and I’m a very proud mum. However, there is a limit to my pride. I have fondly coined the phrase Creative and Remarkable Art Projects (CRAP) for all the 3D objects that they have made over the past year.
Every available surface in our house now boasts at least one piece of modern art. Occasionally, one is recognisable as a house or a plane, but generally the sculptor herself can’t even remember what it’s supposed to be. Shelves are crowded, and the overflow now covers tables, desks, kitchen benches, and the fridge.
And it’s not just preschool – my children gravitate towards craft tables everywhere. During the most recent school holidays, we seemed to stumble across a free make-it-yourself session everywhere we went. At the shopping centre, they made Dora the Explorer door hangers; at the art gallery, they made Alice in Wonderland’s topsy-turvy land in a box; at the botanical gardens, they made the funky flower art that now dominates the fridge.
I envy the mothers of boys at preschool, who complain that their footy-kicking, block-building sons never bring home anything they’ve made. Perhaps they even think I’m showing off when I groan and show them my daughters’ backpacks exploding with examples of their creativity. Little do they know the angst that it causes me.
When my daughters were quite young, I invented a management system for their collections of amazing 2D drawings, which works well. I name, date and title all works that show some degree of skill; for example, “Felicity, aged 2, October 2006, Aliens”.
We have a dedicated gallery area in the kitchen, and the works are rotated regularly. Old paintings make room for the latest abstract collage. I file the best creations from the gallery in a display folder, and the less worthy ones disappear as soon as possible. (An outside bin is best, as small people have been known to retrieve disposed-of artworks from inside bins, slightly confused about how they got there.)
My own art teacher at primary school was horrified when my twin sister and I used to put our artwork in the bin on the way out the door. “Won’t your mother want to see it?” she’d ask us. “You should take it home to her.” My sister and I would reply quite earnestly that our mother wouldn’t want to see it and that she would just put it in the bin anyway.
Today a child would need therapy to deal with such an experience, but at the time my sister and I coped well. We were certainly never under any illusion that our artwork was worthy of a place in a gallery. Our creativity was not necessarily squashed; it was merely channelled into forms that did not clutter up the house.
My mother also admits that our older brother, who is now a successful artist, set a rather high benchmark for drawings considered worthy of praise. My daughters, on the other hand, who are victims of more modern parenting, receive multitudes of praise for nearly every work of art they produce.
Last week, my very amiable husband had finally had enough of the growing collection of cardboard models on his desk, which were making it hard for him to see his computer. He called the girls in for a conference and, in a very reasonable and caring way, explained that he loved each of their artworks but that he would need to throw a few out.
There were wails of sorrow as he suggested pieces that were, perhaps, no longer worthy of a space on his desk. Everything he touched, our daughters immediately grew extremely attached to and miraculously remembered what it was supposed to be.
So those few items that their father did manage to remove from his desk are not in the bin but in a corner of the girls’ bedrooms. The honest, upfront approach was worth a try, but I think that surreptitiously removing items and placing them in the bin while the girls sleep has a better success rate.
My husband did have extra space on his desk for a short while, but I emptied a school bag yesterday and now there are a pig, a sheep and two cows in the space where the fairy village stood a week ago.
Back at preschool, as I bump a few kids’ heads on my way out with Alice’s huge, almost-life-sized submarine, I spot my sister-in-law across the car park. As she doubled over with laughter at the sight of the biggest art installation ever created in one preschool session, I had a brilliant thought. “Alice,” I smile. “Why don’t we give this to Aunty Kim?”
Illustrations By Jody Pratt
