Portrait of an Artist as a Three-and-a-Half Year Old Boy

This post is long overdue. (And just plain long.) I shall remedy that oversight and overdewiness forthwidthit.

First, you must understand that the following statement carries no bias, no traces of fierce pride of parenting. It is said with honesty, with carefully observed scrutiny, and using the powers of analysis that I hold as a published art critic.

My son is a frakking art genius.

And after three years of studious art making, it's damn well time we present to the world his first retrospective.

So here I offer you, the birth and evolution of an Artist. (Notice the capital "A." I don't capitalize willy nilly. I apply that not with hippy liberalism, although I have been endowed with lovely, curvy hips, but with compassionate conservativism.)

Finn is a deliberate artist. Since his earliest encounters with pen and paintbrush--his artistic tools of choice--he has always held them gingerly, resting them in the crook between his forefinger and thumb, never full-hand gripping them with the violent passion of most toddlers.

He works in phases, exploring media and technique until he has utterly exhausted their allure. First, it was pens, then paints, markers, pencils, playdoh, and most recently he has returned to pens--this time branching out into red gel--in what we call his Blood Phase. He has dabbled in crayons, but never fully committed. I suppose the quality waxes too uneven. And crayons are just so common, aren't they?

His first notable study of color and form came in his Circus Period (ca. 2004/5). He had been applying thick swabs of paint to large pieces of butcher paper, crawling and walking around it, exploring all its edges from nearly every perspective. That kinetic dance of paint left him besmeared. And he never looked back.

We'd strip him down to his diaper, and let the happiness in.

Arms, tummy, calves, thighs, feet--Finn would end up totally covered in paint (notably one of the only times he'd work with multiple colors on one "canvas")--and come out the other side looking like a top candidate for the cover photo Bradbury's Illustrated Man (or the more popular and current Ink).

His gross motor skills turned fine in his American Flag Period (ca. 2005/6). And I have evidence of its exhaustive exploration in more than half of my Moleskine. He drew in journals, mine mostly, stitching and looping delicate lines. He called it his American Flag. We still can't figure out why. I would describe it as curvaceous grids. He'd start with a Rubenesque circle and then cascade semicircles, tiny and large off that central form.

His Neoclasssical Period spun off of those first explorations in form. He started coloring in his "flags," drew his first rocketship, and then promptly moved to coloring books. Here, he was more concerned about mastering form than about bold applications of color. Marvel Superheroes, Superdog and friends, All-Star Sports, Spiderman--all these books reveal, page after page, a deliberate application of just one color, markers, sometimes crayons, often pen that, uncharacteristic for his age and without urging from us, stayed within the lines. This, to date, marks his most profilic creations.

Finn then took a break from these flat fields of deliberate color and moved to scultpure--legos, playdoh, and puzzles--and even dabbled in a little performance art, a tribute to his Circus Period. In hindsight, this detour pushed his boundaries of self-expression and creativity, getting him off of the page and on the stage. He traveled inward, and like the Romantics who rebelled against the didactic forms of their Neoclassical brothers, he broke out of the lines and into the realm of pure color and emotion.

In Finn's Albers Phase, he moved away from the big sheets of butcher paper and the formula of color books to small sheets of notepaper, scraps of napkins, anything that would hold pigment. He'd chose one color--purple, red, yellow, brown, something bold--and cover the paper with it, leaving just a little white space at the margins. From those bold and uniform applications of colors, he immediately went minimal: just a line, just a curve, just a thought. Delicate, always deliberate, and expressive of his attempt to lose or find control in a single mark.

But not even that would contain him, for the past two days, Finn has returned to the pen. He's kept the boldness--red gel--but returned to the scrutiny of what can only be described as a culmination of his artistic expressions.

He's even more meticulous, yet even more brazen with his red gel, bleeding his color into forms and onto paper, claiming the violence of his toddler years and yet tempering them with restrained (com)passion.