Springloaded

Okay, this is kind of funny, although I don’t know whether to laugh or submit it to that “I Believe the Children Are the Future and Also Truly Bizarre” website that I just made up.

In honor of the solstice, please to be enjoying Wombat’s artistic study on Spring:

See how the golden sun shines down from above. See how the ground bursts forth with flowers. See how it all looks so…innocent and not at all borderline obsessive.

So, the next day: Spring! Again!

Lovely. Just lovely, isn’t it?

The next day:

And the next:

And the next:

His teacher was kind enough to label this one:

Saaaaaaay, I’m sensing a pattern…

You guys. This has been going for about THREE MONTHS–not every day, but two or three times a week and accounting for 90% of all artwork he brings home. Not included here is his first Spring, a large-scale painting in washable acrylics; his third Spring, on paper too big for the scanner; and all the other versions I didn’t scan because (a) he’d written his name across them in really big letters or (b) my scanning arm got tired because, damn, that’s a lot of Springs.

Now, as a former borderline-obsessive child who had no drawing skill and therefore only ever drew one of three tried-and-true scenes (a flock of birds over rolling hills, a caterpillar in a flower garden, and a scarecrow in a corn field) because what’s the use in doing something if you can’t do it PERFECTLY, I get what’s going on here. It’s comforting to repeat and repeat and repeat something you’ve proven you can do well (hello, my entire professional career), and I mean, yeah, he’s obviously a weird kid, but trust me that this isn’t even the half of it.

I started dating these daily exercises in early December, when my parents visited and my dad, who shares my sense of humor and love of order (or rather I share his) said I had to date them if they were to be properly preserved as the priceless family artifacts they undoubtedly are. “You’ll want to be able to track the progression as they change and get more complex,” he said. So I started dating them, and whaddya know, you can flip through them and see when the sun developed its sun spot (after Wombat saw one on his flashcards of outer space), and when the flowers started comprising many smaller flowers (drawn from life) and, when, behold!, we finally got a rainbow arcing gracefully dangling awkwardly in the sky, like the one we had seen two days earlier.

“I can make the rainbow any colors I want because I’m in charge.”

It’s spring…at night! Stars and brown moon and all. One of his polygamist preschool wives drew the fancy flower.

I shouldn’t be worried, right? I’ve seen him draw other things too–a smiley face, a Christmas tree, a turkey-style tracing of his hand that he turned into a red fire-breathing dragon that will “burn your face right off if you don’t watch out, Mom.” Tooooooootally normal.