Art Show

So the boys are just about obsessed with art these days.  Its almost all they do when around the house, and everyday they are creating something cool at school.  And, we love it.  Their art, whatever shape it takes - painting, tracing, drawing, tying sticks together, mixed media, cutting paper and gluing it together in random arrangments - is such a great magnifying glass on their changes.  We see them changing all the time in their behavior, appearance, play, etc., but art allows us to see the subtlest of changes in their minds and creative ability.  Over a period of days, weeks, months, one sketch at a time, you can see how their re-creation of something evolves, mixing what something "really" looks like, with the way they see it.  For example, a house gets a door and windows, an animal's legs are no longer sticks, all faces are not smiley or the same color.  It is also a window in what they are thinking alot about, as naturally they want to re-create that.  For example, making everything, even non-living things, part of a family, like Mommy, Daddy and Brother and Sister pirate ships.  

Here's a sampling of what is around the house.  

Here is Heath's Father's Day creation for me from school.  Oh, and a caveat: Heath might only seem to like art.  It might just be popular with him as an excuse to tape things to the wall. This had to be taped by my dresser.  The other day he taped a plastic bag of toys to the wall amongst the things in the pic below.

Here is the hub, though there are pics scattered all about the house walls.  I have been meaning to put them up a board with some clips to tidy this display up... but they would overwhelm my efforts to bring order.  Still trying to decide if this is a good idea.  Maybe they should be able to just go for it and tape stuff up wherever.  

Alot of this, the finger painting, is documenting Heath's recent Ocelot phase.  He did these at school.  Here are the titles the teachers help with.

and so on... there was a mommy ocelot too.

This is the type of daily piece we get from school.

Alder's drawing is changing so much all the time.  He is especially into tracing now, from a book, say a dinosaur picture, and then augmenting with something freehand.  And usually, a drawing is accompanied with some cursive practice: "photograph Lions" and i drew a lions".

Note the trusty phonetics.  "I jreew a bobcat"

"i mad a fox"  Love it.  

"thornicroft giraffes"  Here he traced the highlighted cursive that a teacher wrote out first.

Heath drew some monster ships,... as if you needed that caption.  Clearly monster ships.

"I drew a raccoon for my Dad"  I honestly don't know what is up with all the "... for my Dad".  He does draw things for Mom too, but usually its Dad.  He tells me I have to take them to my work to put them on the wall there.  

This is one of our favorites.  These jets are just joyful and totally 5-year old boy.  If we ever get around to making stationary with some of this art, this one is definitely in there.

And wolverine.  The boys are also very intrigued with superheros.  They have a book or two and have not seen any TV/movie/video whatever of these characters, but it is amazing how quickly they pick up on what these guys and gals do, and so commence to pretending.  I am sure much of this is learned on the playground.  But I like that since they have not seen these characters in action, they are not trying to replicate something they have seen.  Rather, they still have some freedom in what they inject into the characters.  For example, the gay pride wolverine.  I'm not sure we want Wolverine to find this laying around.

SO so so so much more going on.   Blog posts needing to be posted are spilling over.  We hope to do another soon...