all the art

I have one tattoo that scrapes across my left ribcage and another that blooms on my upper right arm. My husband is equally marked: left rib, right arm. But my children are no less permanently stained: pens and markers bleed all over their fingers. Their cheeks are smudged with greens, reds, blues. Clothes that I forget to spot treat emerge from the dryer still speckled with whatever they’d used for their artwork that day. I hope that Crayola is not terribly toxic; it is embedded in my children’s hands.

The fruit of these inked fingers has dropped all over the house: I don’t think there is a single room in our home that does not have pages ripped from a sketchpad and left for us to praise. Or, in Dean’s case, taped to his bedroom wall, because the art we’d bought on Etsy and hung in cheap frames is not good enough.

They color every day. They blow through pens; they slash through reams of paper. I should use Amazon’s subscribe and save for art supplies, because I am constantly replenishing our store. I bought Prismacolor at Christmas—I can’t handle cheap pencils, they provoke me to irrational anger—and many of those pricey pencils have been sharpened down, on both ends, to short stubs. 

We bought a rolling cart at Ikea; it now wheels around the house, crammed with scissors, tape, markers, crayons, pencils, and pens. The bottom drawer in the hutch in our dining room never closes all the way; it is too crowded with sketchpads and all the pages they want to save forever.

Most of their drawings are of the same subjects: houses, mermaids, and comics. Never the exact same scene, but a riff on something similar. This week, a new addition to the mountain landscape appeared: a crop of polka-dotted red toadstools. In June’s rendition of our home, pots of daisies decorate the front door. In Dean’s sketch of a neighborhood, all the homes have garages and gutters. Dean plans out a scene of Calvin and Hobbes-inspired stories; June carefully crafts mermaids with bras, blue hair, and scales. One of her sketches depicts a human family, and a thought bubble over the little girl’s head holds a small teal mermaid. Fantasy and reality mix; June draws a picture of our family at the beach under our shibumi, but out at sea a mermaid bobs and a submarine resurfaces.

I don’t know what other kids’ artwork looks like, but I know I’m impressed by what my children have painstakingly, daily, produced.

It is a strange thing, in some ways; it doesn’t seem like play, but work. They come downstairs, and if I’m still cooking breakfast, they yank open that overstuffed hutch drawer and crumpled white computer paper vomits all over the floor. The tin of pencils rattles and spills. They often don’t sit at the table, but crouch on the ground in puppy pose, butts in the air, frantically sketching. 

This goes on for hours.

They do play, too. Someone drags out the hose, gets it spurting and begins the summer-friendly water trampoline game. They collect bricks and rocks from the backyard and build a home for the dollhouse inhabitants that get dragged out to the dirt. June tugs on a tutu, fairy wings, a mermaid top, and a tiara; she is now princess mermaid kitty cat. Dean disappears with a few Schleich animals, and I can hear his voice, which sounds different in fantasyland, speaking for the animals, acting out their imagined lives. They race, they tag, they build pillow towers, they construct marble runs.

But they always come back to their art.

Why are they creating? Is it the sheer joy of covering a blank sheet of paper? Is there an image burned in their brains that must be translated to a page? What causes my children to forget their toys and spend hours sprawled on the ground, ink-stained, only to emerge later with a stash of very similarly drawn prints? Is this play, or is this work? Who is their audience?

Sometimes, I feel guilty for the times I sit down to write. It isn’t play; it usually feels at least a little like work. I have no audience; I don’t like social media and the thought of trying to garner followers seems disingenuous. If anyone follows me, let it be of their own volition, not because I’ve promised a like or a newsletter signup in return. 

Sometimes, there is nothing in my head to get out. I sit, and this is my time, when the kids are gone and the house is quiet except for all the appliances churning and gurgling inside. Maybe I make a cup of matcha and, yet again, remember that I don’t like matcha and I need to stick with black coffee. Maybe I get out a black bean brownie or a bar of chocolate. Maybe I stare out into the trees, where the sun has finally hit and broken through the dark green gloom, and then back at my screen, which remains in early morning shadow. 

But I can always write. I can always find a word somewhere and wrangle it into submission, and then another, and then another, and then they’re unspooling, like something tight and tangled inside my chest is slowly unraveling into a barely discernible heap of meaning before me.

I don’t mind that my children are using up paper and ink. Their progress in their artwork is vast and shocking. They devote hours to the task, and they’ve got the improved prints to show for it. The frames tacked to our walls now boast more than outdated photos; they hold my favorite scenes, of mermaids and houses with swings in the trees and families connected by tiny hearts floating through the air. Wherever this creativity is born, either out of love for the medium or something inside that needs to come out, maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe what matters is that they’ve got a well-stocked drawer and a cart rattling around with expensive pencil stubs.

Maybe it’s all right that I could be inside cleaning, and I’m out here on the deck instead, uninspired. Maybe it’s all right just to write, for no reason other than it is the way that I play, and it is the way that I work, and there is no distinguishable line between the two. Maybe it’s all right.

Maybe creating something for no reason, for no audience, is not a waste. 

Maybe it’s a way for me to sit back, matcha swapped for coffee, paper towel greasy from the mostly-eaten brownie, and realize that if I am creating for no apparent reason, it is because I am made in the image of the One who created everything. There is no need for me to write in order to survive. My children do not need to color. We don’t have to have essays, we don’t have to have imagined mountain houses surrounded by trees and mushrooms and tulips. We don’t have to, but we do. We do. 

We keep creating. We keep writing, we keep drawing.

Maybe this is what it means to be human. To be human, but made by divine hands. Formed of dust, created for eternity. 

It is good, I think, to write for no audience. It is good to have mermaids in every room of my house. It is good to remember that before he was Savior, he was Creator.