Art Studio for Kids is a series for children and offers a chance to explore and create.
I remember running through the tulips. A whole field of tulips.
I was a small child. It could not have been a field; it was a garden. I zigzagged along the manicured paths; childhood is color and light, and it’s difficult to stay in the lines. The colors blurred and bled.
But the tulips weren’t moving. I was. I was called inside (children are always being called inside) to a house that wasn’t my house.
The owner of the house that was not mine took me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I don’t remember the drive into the city, except that there was a driver in a cap.
I didn’t have a driver; I had a mother. We carpooled. Also, the interior of the car with the driver was the lightest tan. Ours was graphite grey with juice stains.
We bypassed the galleries and went to the attic (was it really an attic?). Vast, full of light, piled with great works of art in need of restoration. My guardian is checking on a particular piece, the Delacroix.
I do not remember anything else from the day. I remember only the sunlit room where museum workers in lab coats and gloved hands applied solvents with soft brushes to paintings and sculptures, among them the Delacroix.
Memory is faulty. There was a tulip garden. We did visit the museum. It doesn’t matter when, and maybe it was no more than an insignificant errand. “How’s the Delacroix going?” she might have asked.
Delacroix himself, I imagine, would have delighted in such ambiguity. He was a meticulous draftsman who could adhere to the rigors of academic drawing; he often traced his source material. But he also drew from memory, refined and simplified, improvised and reduced. Exuberant and vigorous, his drawings searched for something essential in the composition, generously leaving room for “each beholder to finish it as he chooses.”1 He also knew drawing from memory could summon a range of feelings and emotions in the viewer.
His lines were free-flowing, seemingly random contours; they had energy and vibrancy. There is a term for this in art. It is called restating. Drawing over one’s work, adjusting for mistakes, but never quite fixing. The restated drawing may have more life than a polished final piece.
Toni Morrison wrote of memory, “The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.”2
That house, that garden—they were never mine. But, as I sit here, composing, I remember the tulips.
Activity
Here’s an art exercise inspired by Delacroix for children and adults alike.
Find an image or a piece of art. It can be anything. For children, maybe it’s a picture of a truck, a flower, or a dragon. Something simple that they love.
Trace the image in the air with the pencil or crayon hovering above the page. Vary the speed, fast and slow. Narrate back what they are doing (‘I see your wheel’, ‘Look at the petals’, ‘Watch out for those teeth…’). Give life to the air in front of them.
Then, putting the reference image aside, set the pencil down on the paper. Draw loosely. Restate the lines and contours. It will be wild and free. Note where there are big lines and small ones, broad strokes, and detail. You are showing them how to observe and how to control their hand—skills that will be valuable when practicing handwriting. It’s also a nice way to build confidence.
Dunn, A. E., Ives, C., & Shelley, M. (2018). Delacroix Drawings: The Karen B. Cohen Collection. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Morrison, Toni. "Memory, Creation, and Writing," Thought. Vol. 59 No. 235 (December 1984).