On Painting With a Young Child

By Jessica Hoffmann Davis

Squeezing new tube watercolors on to a disposable palette is always a joyful event. The pure white ground of the palette; the individual paint piles of cadmium red, and blue, a bit of cyan, a larger pile of white, and of course black. But under the close and careful watch of an excited 3-year-old, the activity is almost sacred. "Yes, the red." "Oooh, the green. My favorite color." "Lots of white." Approvingly, "Black." We are artists we two, this small boy and his grandmother. We have been discussing our shared status as we settle into the tiny lakeside cottage and approach our painting. I caution, "This is my studio, and we must take care of our tools." The sacredness is in the ritual of it all.

I remember a summer afternoon years before my grandson was even a possibility in the life of my son. A 3-year-old girl, the child of a dear friend, came to sit close by as I painted on a Martha's Vineyard beach. Could she, if she was very careful, paint alongside me? Her meticulousness was impressive. She dutifully and repeatedly washed her brush, just as I had instructed, before dipping it into any of the colorful piles of pigment.

My grandson began with such care. As his brush touched fresh paper, each color was clean. A ball of yellow lined steadily with blue, then green. With each stroke, his visible response to the image he was creating mounted. A smile at the appearance of the first color, a purposefulness about the application of the next. There was now, without a doubt, a need for red. His brush, with a bit more wantonness than any stroke before, hit the water and then the mound of red and, with emphatic gestural freedom, finally, the paper that was carefully...