Remi and I stayed at the painting table after everyone else had left. She asked me to guess what she was painting. 

First, she took some blue and drew a roundish circle shape, moving her arm around in a big movement across almost the whole easel. I said, “Well, that looks like it could be a circle. But a circle can also be a wheel, or a face, or a planet!”

Then she made a smaller circle inside the bigger one, and I noted this, adding, “that could still be a wheel, or a donut!” She smiled, giggled.

Next she painted two more circles inside the big one, filling them in, and a soft w-shape inside the smaller circle. She kept looking over her shoulder or turning around to look at me, waiting for me to make more guesses. I had suspected it might turn out to be a face since she drew the circle, because humans love to reflect that most intimate and familiar image endlessly, but now that it had plausible eyes, I moved in that direction. As she began the oblong appendage off to the right, I commented, “I remember that you like animals a lot. I wonder if this is going to be an animal”. She turned around and nodded, slowly and definitively, a smile spreading across her face. 

And so I asked her what her favorite animals are, and she listed five, all very different from each other except they might have all been mammals. Remi often pretends to be a nonhuman animal at school, moving about on all fours, making animal sounds instead of speech, even wearing a getting-prettty-tight fur suit sometimes as part of her play. She and her friends are often animals having adventures together, punctuated by frequent interjections of, “And pretend…” with ever more plot twists and additions. Part of me bringing up animals this way was an offer to talk more about a subject that I know she likes.

So she told me about her favorite animals, concluding with “...and puppies”, with a meaningful glance back at me as she paused in her work. The guessing game could have been over then, but she was just starting to mix the paint for the brown fur, and we both wanted the game to go on, so I just smiled back. Then she asked me about my favorite animals, and I said something like it’s hard to choose, but I especially like sea creatures, and I listed a few. She warned me that lantern fish can eat people whole, and I countered that they live in the really deep part of the ocean, so even if they plausibly could, they wouldn’t, and she sort of conceded that, noncommittally. 

She nudged me to make more guesses, and by that time, the face had two floppy ears, was painted brown all over, and was now beginning to have what looked like a collar and tags, so I made my guess. “Is it a puppy?” “Yes”, she nodded vigorously, pleasure showing in her face. She told me that she is an artist, and maybe she will also be an artist when she grows up. I agreed, affirming that she is an artist right now, and affirming that she can also be when she is all grown up, too. 

After we admired her painting together, she said, “let’s keep playing!”, so I moved the big paper around so that she had a new blank canvas. This time, she dipped her brush into the pink, and began with a large, oblong shape. I narrated, “Oh, this one is not exactly a circle. It’s a little bit round but it’s also long”... She added detail to the shape: a zigzag line up and down the oval. I made thinking sounds, not knowing what those might represent. 

We continued to chat as she added more details: another oblong shape off to the right at the top of the first one, two dots inside it, with a meaningful backward glance when I wondered if those might be eyes. Some sort of appendage off the left bottom side. I actually had no plausible guess. But like before, when I might have made an accurate guess earlier but it would have spoiled the game, I just kept describing and noticing, drawing it out. We established at some point that it was another animal, but that’s it.

She concluded by engaging my gaze and then punctuating the image with a series of dots descending from the animal. I still could not guess what it was, and finally, she told me: “It’s a seahorse giving birth”. I had listed seahorses among my favorites earlier, while she was painting the puppy, and she had stored this information, now generously making this second painting of one of my favorites, alongside one of her favorites. We admired it together, discussing how daddy seahorses actually have their babies, a moment she had captured so thoughtfully.

Remi is finishing her Rainforest year; she will be a kindergartener in just a few weeks. For a young artist to have this kind of mastery over their instrument, they have to have practiced a long time already. They have to have built up their core muscles and the muscles in their arms and shoulders, legs and hips, by, say, scurrying around a big, wild yard on all fours, jumping, practicing the monkey bars, pulling their legs up until their feet touch the bars. They have to have had time and concentration to observe and understand animal anatomy, a study pursued at their leisure with help from caring adults to read all the books and take them to the zoo and teach them patiently how to be gentle with their pets. They have to have made innumerable other drawings, some frustratingly unlike the image they were trying to capture in their minds. They have to have persisted through so much failure, so many tries that didn’t quite turn out, so many times that an adult could have just done it for them, but didn’t. There is so much unseen work that goes into a child making a painting like this, and it cannot be skipped.

Adults seem to have a tendency to want to skip to the end. We will guess right away what a child may be drawing or building. We love to label things. We know so many words and we have so much experience, and it’s a way that we tend to process the world. We sort, label, and categorize everything without even noticing that we are doing it, because that’s the way we move through the world. We have to make a million small decisions all day every day, and after 30 or 40 years of this, our brains do it automatically. 

Children also sort, label, and categorize, but it’s more noticeable to us when they do it, because the categories they choose often surprise us, or they say labels out loud that adults have learned to say only in our minds. I will never forget learning that my son had concluded that people’s skin gets darker as they get older, which was drawn from the available evidence in our family. I learned this when he was referring to a very dark skinned young man we knew but described him as “that very old man” because of the color of his skin. I was briefly confused, and extremely surprised about the particular sorting he had done there, and it helped me recognize that we had apparently not talked about how skin color works. 

At Cottage, we have an invitation to hold back on some of our adult assumptions and hold space for the magic of childlike wonder. It helps us hear what a child already knows, what they have questions about as they try to understand, and what has never even occurred to them. One way we practice this is by holding back our labels and judgements. This is hard work for grownups!

I had another opportunity to practice the next day, with a group of younger children. I sat low at the drawing table with several artists, all making their own work at their own pace, using markers on paper. One child in that group not only makes figurative narrative drawings, but labels them with correctly spelled words and names, an uncommon skill in her age group. 

Most children were practicing foundational skills that will allow them to make that kind of work in the near future. Often it looks like this:

In this drawing, a child was chatting to me as they worked, about this and that, but not about a story that was emerging through their drawing. Like the other child, they began by moving the arm in a big circle-ish shape around the whole writing surface. They made a smaller circle inside. They followed it with two scribbles of pigment at one end. 

At that point, to my surprise, they handed me the marker and asked me to draw on their picture, too. I was tentative, because I could not identify the intention of asking for my contribution, so I did what has become my default when drawing with children: I copied them. I drew a small scribble at one end, trying to mimic the motion of the marker that they had made when drawing a moment earlier. I paused; they took the marker back, seemingly satisfied, and continued to add detail to the work, while chatting about everything but the picture. I did not ask questions, but followed their lead about what was interesting, which was, largely, conversation. 

These brief moments of appreciation and conversation and togetherness were available to us because at our school, we provide the materials, and then step back and allow the children to use them in just about any way they choose. If we had been “helping them” make a bulletin board full of mostly identical seasonal-themed pictures, not only would none of this artwork have emerged, but we would have missed and squashed the discussion and the bonding and the relationship building that happens when we sit and listen to kids as they engage in their chosen work. And when we have a kid who seldom chooses to work at a drawing table or an easel, who instead is out there running and jumping and digging and climbing, we know that they are also doing prewriting work, by building all those muscles that they need when they do decide to make artwork.