Artwork

The whiteboard in the adult lounge is supposed to be for my choir.

Back when I started as the choir director, I would write the rehearsal order up on the white board. I would also note any hymn numbers that we needed to go over and any changes to the upcoming schedule.

Then I started bringing a little bundle in a carseat with me on Sunday mornings, and eventually the bundle was up and crawling around between the altos and sopranos (all of whom were convinced that James regarded them as an auxilary grandparent), and then he was up and walking and conducting along with me.

James was the most restrained with the whiteboard. As an artist he only had two major phases--carwashes and hockey rinks. For the first few years of his drawing career he would only draw the Royal Carwash that we lived next to on Clover Street. First the attendants shouting neutral, then the spish-spish, then the wipe-wipe, then the wee-ooh, wee-ooh, then the rinse, then the bubbles, then the rinse. Simple.

James was also the most responsible about putting caps back on markers when he was done, although I still regularly found dry erase markers almost entirely dried out a week after he'd hidden them behind the piano. Owen, I think, leaves them out to ruin on purpose.

The hockey phase was slightly more interesting. He would change up the teams that were playing, but the basic features of the arena were always the same.

Owen has been a free spirit, artistically, from the beginning. He began by drawing on himself and his Sunday clothes, and then to copying James' hockey arenas. He progressed next to repeated letter Os, and then to his whole name, and then to whatever James had been talking about/obsessing over for that week.

Felix joined in at the earliest age, probably because both of his older brothers were coloring the white board as soon as they'd finished their morning laps. (As soon as we arrive at church every Sunday they tear around the empty building at full speed for about 10 minutes.) Felix could barely reach the bottom edge of the white board when he first started drawing, and more than once I had to remove a marker to keep him from sucking on it. He mostly, according to Owen, draws grass.

It's become an expectation now for my choir to survey their weekly artwork before they look at the rehearsal instructions. I think, for them, it's a little bit like seeing what the Google doodle of the day is going to be. Owen announced his masterpiece from atop a chair this week and pointed to show the finer details.

"It's Darth Vader getting kicked in the penis. It's funny, because he's being kicked in his penis."

In other artwork news, Felix made a Jackson Pollock painting on our living room this evening using nothing but his stomach acid, a recently consumed bottle of milk, and some sort of flu strain. We acknowledged out loud when we bought our lovely and expensive new couch that one of the kids would eventually throw up on it. I think we were both surprised when it wasn't Owen. Felix is now putting a towel on his head and sitting on a quarantine blanket in the library. His George is in the dryer for the third night running. (Mud and water incidents, unrelated)