Lucy

I hate to talk it up too much, because I don't like to focus on any one thing about one of our kids. But this new installment on Lucy is, once again, on her art.

Lucy keeps coming up with stuff that impresses me. I don't know that she's necessarily way ahead of the curve in basic drawing and coloring skills. What blows me away is her constant experimentation. Everything she does plays with some concept or assumption of art. I know that sounds a little overblown, but I think it's supported by the evidence.

For instance:

I thought this picture was so creative. Start with a lollypop, lion, and lemon on the left (all starting with L) and then what follows is her name, but with a face drawn in each letter (I assume the Y didn't get the full treatment because she ran out of space). What prompted her to draw her name with each letter containing a face, each face in a closed-or semi-closed space? Is the picture above the L a picture of her-- another L-word object? It's interesting, way beyond just looking at the aesthetics of the picture.

Another one:


This is a picture of Lucy, her two best friends (Grace and Jane), and Molly. (Sorry, I didn't take the time to find who is who). The interesting part of this picture is that Lucy's faces are never square. They're always elongated curvy shapes or circles. For some reason, she made what must have been a conscious decision to make all of the faces here squares. Why? Why would she be thinking about that at all? Is she deliberately trying to shake things up? Is she just experimenting to find out what forms look the best to her? Regardless, she's obviously giving a lot of thought to the assumptions of her work, and not just the normal aesthetics.

Last one:

This is a drawing Lucy did in Church last week. What's interesting is how the characters are clustered around the blue smudge, which is a watermark on every sheet of this stationery paper. (Recognize it, Julie and Reed?) Instead of just letting the paper remain as an inert backdrop to her art, for some reason Lucy decided to let it have an active effect on what she was doing. It looks like the blue ellipse must be a table where all the people are sitting. What made her decide to pull the blue part into the foreground and use it as a prop, separated from the white space that still serves as backgroud? How did she think of that?

This probably looks like a lot of over-analysis over nothing. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I would never in a million years have come up with any of this when I was her age, so the contrast interests me. But I am really intrigued to know the reasoning in Lucy's head behind the obviously deliberate choices she makes in each new unique piece of art. None of them is the most beautiful thing ever, but the combination really shows off a pretty unique personality. Which is exactly what she is.