Add another thing to the diverse list of interests for the Monster.

We have a cart near the door to our patio with all kinds of art stuff in it.  It’s been there for a while – I don’t quite remember when we got it or what inspired it – but it has paint and markers and the like in the various rainbow-hued drawers, ready for the taking.

Now, I grew up with a giant drawer in our kitchen for markers and crayons.  (In fairness, I think it was probably two of the three drawers on that side, and I can’t for the life of me remember what would have been in the top drawer… but it was the “fun messy art supplies for the children” area.)  And one should bear in mind that, despite this, I have zero artistic talent, so the limit of my creativity in the aesthetic space is roughly-drawn stick figures.  The Monster, for the most part, seems to have inherited his artistic ability from me.  If you give him crayons or markers, or colored pencils, he’ll draw a succession of lines or scribbles.  (“Rainbow Study #138” anyone?)  He’s capable of following directions to color-in something if given a drawing, and like most children, there’s no telling if the thing’ll end up as an appropriate color for the thing (which is fine) – we end up with a lot of drawings of purple and green people, and the like.

Somewhere along the way on Sunday, R discovered the (now long-since dried) paints in the art cart, and was mucking with them a bit.  Because it was nice on Sunday, the wife sent them out onto our back patio to play with the watercolors, once she showed them how to use them by dipping the brushes into the water, smearing it into the palette of paint, and applying it to paper.

Between their dashes outside to play in the yard and their coming back in to paint, I wandered over to see what it was that the Monster was doing with his paints.  Lo and behold, it wasn’t just a series of lines for a change, as if he’d been seeing what it’d look like dried.  He was actually applying it in various directions this way and that…

“So what are you painting, Monster?” I asked him.  He turned and looked up at me for a moment, brown eyes blinking behind his glasses.

“A mountain.”

A mountain.  I don’t know if he’s actually ever seen a mountain, or how he perceives one, but… I’ll admit that I think I can see it in there, if I look at it for a few seconds, and it was a real answer that fit the question asked.

There’s a career path out there for an abstract landscape artist, right?