I took the girls on a tour of Ellie’s future art class that will begin in September. It was a chance to find the building so we wouldn’t be late the first day, examine the supply cupboard, bathroom and instructor cleanliness, providing us a last minute chance to cancel the registration like a condition on a house offer if she wasn’t blown away by all of the above. Of course, in typical Ellie fashion, she was beaming as soon as she saw the newly painted parking spaces were clearly outlined and skipped excitedly onto the first concrete step raving about the angle on the ramp next to it to accommodate those in wheelchairs.
Our tour guide handled the fact we ploughed through the front doors with three young girls, one of whom could tear everything below chair rail height off the walls simply by walking as she normally does, leaning while resting her shoulder on the wall, using her arms as a fan, extremely well.
I was impressed with the art samples she showed us and even more so when she assigned ages to some of the artists. This seemed like a set up. There was no way three year old “Amber” painted that Picasso. I simply wasn’t going to wear that shame all day knowing my kids were still unable to follow the paint-by-numbers instructions.
She asked the girls a question that had us all scratching our heads. She asked if they knew what the medium was on a particular piece of art.
The baby was firmly planted in the janitor’s mop bucket which, at this point, is where the rest of us belonged.
The five year old put her pointer finger over her lips and tapped as though she was too connected to this gallery of paintings to even hear what had been asked. The answer would come to her if she just held her finger there long enough and focused her gaze on the 3D ladybug on canvas.
To let us off the hook, the instructor asked our seven year old, “I’m sure your older sister knows what medium was used,” and seemed to expect a quick and correct answer from the child who appeared to be wondering why anyone would use that cement form that separates the two lanes on a highway to create art.
Do not ask me lady. Do not ask me or I will take my deposit and run to my perfectly outlined Grand caravan space. If she backed me into a corner all I could think to say was, “The message is the medium, the message is the medium,” until that too started to sound ridiculous.
Obviously the deposit was paid as was the year’s tuition in full.
Clearly their trick worked. They actually made us believe we didn’t know anything about art.
