fairy doodles

bean1's artistic doodlings have for a couple of months now focused on the realm of the imagination.

below is one of her latest - a rendition of a fairy and 2 flying horses heading off from a fairy castle. (jan 2010)

this next one she did in december - it's the sugar plum fairy, as quaintly titled by bean1 (see pix top lefthand corner), after the creature from the nutcracker.

bean1 is very taken with ballet, especially the sleeping beauty and the nutcracker. she loves dancing to the entire nutcracker suite whilst i feed bean2 (btw, bean2 is on solids - ingesting but very little though as most end up on her bib, high chair, floor, head, me).

however, she constantly reminds me that her "star performance", as she terms it, is marred by the lack of appropriate footwear. she has a leotard and skirt already - christmas pressies from dh and i - so we have tried to convince her to wait till we get to china and when (if?) she starts ballet classes before buying them. dh has already seen a shop that sells ballet shoes, but i really insist that classes are found and enrolled in before we commit to shoes.

* to see enlarged images of the illustrations, just click on the pictures.

when dinosaurs roamed the erth (sic)

yesterday, when bean2 and i went to pick up la premiere bean from school, the latter came out from class only to burst out, "mummy! i wrote a story today! about dinosaurs. about dinosaurs when they died and then the woolly bird came around and ate all the horses."

apparently this was for writing practice and when i met her teacher this morning at drop-off, i was told, "it was wonderful. there was a lot of information. it was not easy deciding what to write, but we managed finally. all about when dinosaurs died and then the woolly bird ate the horses." her teacher paused, gave me a knowing nod and continued, "yeah. that woolly bird."

i think i know where bean1 came up with this - from one of her dinosaur books. and yes, there is a chapter on the Tertiary period where mammals and large birds called Gastornis existed. The Gastorni diet (according to the book) seemed to consist of the early form of horses.

here's her writing practice sample:

translation: Dinosaurs died when the Earth changed and the woolly bird ate little horses.

why the bean doesn't draw elephants

it's interesting that the bean doesn't do many representational drawings anymore. at least, none that qualifies in the traditional sense.

she is more interested in doing 'action' art - as she draws, she relates a story, but the end result is often something akin to a cy twombly piece without the calligraphy/graffitti (hey, i'm not equating the bean's output with that from an abstract expressionism icon, but there are similar elements!), where the scribblings will only make sense to the artist, not the viewer.

see an example here that she'd dashed off today, which i shall title emergency rocket ship*:

when i asked her to explain her drawing she informed me that it's an "mergent (sic) rocket ship, mummy" - "it brings people to the emergent (sic) in mars to the hospital".

visual components include: 2 policemen (the blue sperm-like squiggles on the left of the picture) ; a long chain of "prison" cells for the "baddies"; fire from the rocket ship; an area to lock up bad policemen; not forgetting the emergency rocket ship; and a jellyfish.

yes, all quite disparate elements but she has a bizarre narrative going as she drew the picture, all about baddies killing jellyfish and the policemen who put the baddies in jail, in parallel with a rocket ship that flies to mars to help people in an emergency.

anyhow, before she embarked on this 'epic' i had asked if she could draw me an animal, like an elephant, only to be told the obvious, "no-o. the elephant is too big for my paper."

when i asked if she could draw a small/baby elephant instead, she said, "no. it's still too big."

don't ask me about her logic: why rocket ships will fit onto the paper but not an elephant.

then last week, whilst i was cooking she came to the kitchen with one of these 'action' drawings and told me she was going to read me a story. she held her artwork like a parchment, looked at it and then 'recited' a story about 2 children flying all the way from london to visit her in australia.

when i interjected with a question, she paused and said, "mummy, don't interrupt!"

*click on the picture to enlarge

pink camel

I think the Bean did this drawing a few days ago, but my memory is hazy, and it could've been done a week ago. Anyhoo, I can't remember the context, but she told me that she'd drawn and coloured a camel (in one of her favourite colours). The face of the creature can be clearly discerned I think, and I have marked out where she had put the humps of the camel. The 4 legs are there too, with the space between the limbs coloured in.

It seems to be a kind of progression to a more realistic representation of animals. Certainly a development away from the blobs with stick arms and legs that stood for ALL humans and animals when she first started.

weird figures

[figure below] the bean calls this "the maylien". it's actually an impression of the alien from cocoon 2 (the movie) - she saw it last saturday afternoon when dh was watching the film on tv.


[figure below] and this is a "bad man. he catches bad people and puts them in pwison." i had to explain that policemen aren't bad. although they put people in "pwison" it's usually only "bad people" who get put away.

an interesting feature of this figure is that it actually has a body. previously, the limbs of a person just simply sprouted from a giant head, but this time she's added a torso. she's also added fingers to the stick arms - those shorter twig-like additions at the end.

the bean's altruism & self-portrait #2

dh came home at lunchtime today and as he accompanied the bean at the dining table, she said to him, "daddy, i don't like my chicken pox. (slight pause) can i give it away?"

they continued this conversation in the car later - "who do you want to give it away to?", asked dh.
to which the bean replied, "you".

hmmm...she just might get her wish and one or both her parents could be infected right now.

(btw, dh added that as she was walking to the car she told him that she wanted to leave her chicken pox at home.)

anyhow, this is her latest self-portrait..."it's leah with chicken pox", she announced almost triumphantly to me just now.

i'll describe the portrait a bit - the dot within a circle at the top of the figure's 'head' represents the pox on the bean's forehead (she has just a little pox there); the mad-looking scribbling at the bottom of the figure is the bean's clothing; the two little lines sticking out from the bottom of the 'head' are the bean's legs; 2 circles each side of the wide mouth represent 'rosy cheeks' or they might be ears; figure is missing arms.

note on the picture titles: the numbering of the bean's pictures is just for the blog's reference, and does not correspond to any real-life output.

family portraits # 1

today the bean decided to use some new marker pens to do a picture of her cousin matteo. he's the one in maroon attached to a green rock - don't ask me what a rock is doing in the mise-en-scene. (sorry, i've been told that it is NOT a rock, it is a golf ball...apparently matteo is hitting it. silly mummy...)

standing beside matteo are his grandparents, the bean's po po and gong gong, looking suitably taller, albeit a trifle gaunt and limbless.

i have to add that these portraits were not commissioned by me. it was the bean's own spontaneous decision to do them.

bean's self-portrait # 1

this is the bean's first self-portrait (she'd done a couple of portraits of me before), done yesterday afternoon, thurs 6 nov. it's some evidence of her artistic progress. she began as all kids do, by being content merely daubing on colour and then she moved to what-seemed-like random scribbles and doodles, and thence latterly to 'panda bears', her first 'representational' drawing subject.

after pandas, she did one octopus (with exactly 8 legs, counting as she drew them) and then a few whales and one cat. surprisingly, even though she absolutely adores cats (probably her favourite animal "all day long"*) she hasn't been particularly interested in drawing them.

she really started drawing 'properly' after we came back from the uk early october, when she went into a frenzy of artistic 'expression' - in fact, for a long time, her one drawing subject was the panda bear - a shapeless blob with stick legs, arms and ears, eyes (one big, one small) and gash-like mouth. her montessori directress suggested that i stock the house with lots of paper for her to doodle as this burst of drawing is usually a precursor to actual writing.

our living room is now adorned with a few of her drawings - i've pegged them onto the fishing wire that the previous tenants had left strung on the walls.

* "all day long" is bean-speak for 'all the time'/ 'always'/ 'everytime'/ 'forever'...