My Son the Artist Part II

This is Part II of my two part series, inspired by Harvey and Frank J., on my son’s artistic capabilities.

These events occurred in 2nd grade. We’ve moved past stick figures and sea serpents. At the urging of a friend of his, he draws a picture of a stick figure watching the school as it blows up. Now he can read; now there are captions. Keep in mind, he loves school. It was just something to draw, but now that there are captions actually admitting that it’s a school and it’s blowing up, and there are assorted bombs all over, it is now not funny to the new teacher, who I always thought was an edgy psycho who took things too seriously, and to her, this is all GREATLY disturbing. Alas, he gets in big trouble. The whole time he’s saying to me, “I don’t get why everyone is mad! The school was empty! Nobody got hurt!” Well, you just don’t draw pictures of schools blowing up anymore, especially when you go to Catholic school. We had to discuss appropriate vs. inappropriate drawing topics. A topic I am sure we will discuss in the future, yet again, if he moves past stick figures and realizes girls are around for other things than to harass.

We are now getting closer to his 1st Holy Communion. I’m not Catholic, but my husband and children are. There is this prayer called the Hail Mary. The assignment of the class was to create a book and write the prayer with a single line from the prayer at the top of a page and then draw what it means underneath. There is a line in the prayer that goes something like, "And this at the hour of our death”… you can only imagine.

They post these books in the hallway. I happen down the hall and start looking for my artistic son’s rendition. I flip through it and get to that magical line. He drew a coffin, he’s in it, dead, with X’s over his eyes. Now I’m thinking, “Ok, very practical and reasonable, but how did the OTHER children interpret this?” I start flipping through all the books.

Girls. All the same. Every one of them, balloons, holding hands with Mary, green beautiful grass, birds chirping, rainbows, flowers, angels, love love love.

Boys. Death. In a variety of ways. Seems my son’s was one of the most tame. Who woulda thunk? I’ve got the kid who had a stick figure blow up the damn school. (BTW, it was a good spatially accurate drawing of his school… even if it was exploding. He had all the windows in the right place, got the number of floors correct, got the shape right… I digress.) I flip open another boy’s and he has a picture of himself, his mother has been in a car wreck, and he is flying through a windshield of his mother’s vehicle, evidently not wearing a seatbelt, and splats onto another car. And dies. How many times has this kid probably heard, “If you don’t put on your seat belt, and I get in a wreck, you’ll fly through this windshield and die!”? Hmm. I gather a lot. Nice.

The last and my personal favorite, was this one boy’s that has himself drawn in a hockey goal, having been bludgeoned to death. Blood all over. He’s lying in the bottom of the goal. Dead. Wha??? Damn. What in the hell did those parents let that kid watch on TV?

Boy art vs. girl art. It isn’t the same. But boy Art is much more fun. (Big Grin)