For the Sake of Children

For those not acquainted with the community where Wendy and Ilive, here is one small part of it. Each November we hold a two-day “festival” featuring a variety of crafts we have created during the year. We welcome ten thousand visitors, and raise almost $200,000 that goes toward helping residents who have run out of money. For my part, I create watercolor paintings, and from them have printed hundreds of greeting cards I sell, dedicating all the income to the fund.

This year, the highlight for me took place a few days after the festival, when I received the following text:

Yesterday you gave three of my kids really pretty paintings...just wanted to say thank you. These pictures are beautiful, and that was very kind of you.

As I sat by my booth chatting with those who came by to have a look, now and then a family with small children would drift through. If any of these kids showed an interest in art, I gave them a painting.

I have a half dozen great grandchildren I see on the rare occasions when they visit. But whenever they come, even lf they are as young as three, we walk over to the studio, locate a small palette, dab on it some primary color paints. find a brush and some artist’s paper. The kids do their thing about which they are always proud. Their creations are then displayed on the refrigerator door, after their great grandmother and their parents fawn over the magnificence of their paintings.

Wendy will tell you that I am awkward with children. True. I am never sure what to say, and if I get down on the floor with them, getting back up is – oh well. But if color and a bit of paint bridge the gap, good.

Fewer and fewer schools have art classes any more, and that also goes for music. But don’t kids see enough ugliness, violence and inhumanity?
Finding some lovely colors to brush on paper may be a better use their time than untold hours thumbing those ubiquitous gadgets.

It is not only kids that may be emotionally starving in a society increasingly committed to the tawdry and the grim. I admit to being a news junkie, but how much of what is going on in the world can even I absorb without growing cynical? So what is being ground into children? Isn’t there beauty all around us if we bother to look? There is nature to celebrate, music to hear, and color all witnessing to the world’s nobility.

So, in giving a simple amateur painting to a child, maybe I’m casting a tiny vote for a saner world. I know I am destined to spend much of my time in the rubbish heap we have made for ourselves, but even whales who are destined to spend their lives in the dark ocean depths must come up now and then for a breath of fresh air.

As disturbed as I am with the dangerous man who is president, and while I will continue to call for his defeat, I will not spend all my time and effort crying,
‘AIN’T IT A SHAME?’ There is more to life than that, so this afternoon—and most afternoons –I’ll splash some colors on artist’s paper even if no one but me ever sees them, and think about those three little children, and the mother who came by my festival booth.