Margo à la Maude

Just as I sat down to write this entry on Margo's drawings, Donna asked if I thought that Margo is artistic.

Maybe.

Then again, maybe not. At this point, her ability isn't the point; the point is that I'm seeing this amazing evolution taking place, and Margo's at a point where she can tell stories behind her pictures.

Starting from the beginning, the first step that a child takes with crayons is to eat them. You can argue all you want about "the medium is the message" and "performance art," but in the end, my kid had waxy residue on her lips.

Then crayon to paper. That's fun. Jagged, unconnected lines. Then jagged connected lines - zigzags.

Donna's childhood friend, Chris, came to visit us. Chris has had a successful career as an illustrator in the computer game industry, and won Margo over by drawing Disney characters. And once he won her over, he taught her the concept of circles. One small step for Margo, one giant, oblong/egg-shaped leap for Margokind.

And then, in February of this year, she drew a face. A face! And another the day after.


Carmen, her caregiver, told us after the fact that she had been drawing faces for a while now.

Neat. Could have used that info earlier, Carmen, but neat nonetheless.

Then sometime in May, Margo added legs to the equation. No body, but bodies are a much later development. Legs are good, though. She even coloured the facial parts and legs differently. And if I remember correctly, it was a drawing of a balloon turtle, or a turtle laughing like a clown... something like that. I even repeated what I thought she said, but slightly differently than the way she said it, and she angrily told me "no," and repeated what it was. Margo doesn't like art critics.


On father's day, Margo made me a card. Inside, there was a drawing of me, and a self-portrait on the opposite page. I think that the multiple slashes on my face may have been an attempt at depicting my goatee.

She also gave me a painting on stretched canvas. I'll post a photo later, but it's bright blue brushstrokes, with a feather glued in the middle and a jag of glitter positioned asymmetrically. It's entitled "A Witch."

"Happy Father's Day, Papa. I know you've always wanted a symbolic painting of a witch."

I digress. The amazing thing about the father's day card is that, on the cover, I think she drew our family. Our family. She drew all the members of our family together on one page.


There's a slim chance that it may instead have been a depiction of the poster for The Witches of Eastwick, sticking with the witch theme. I repeat, slim, but after the turtle laughing like a clown balloon incident, I'm not willing to rule the movie poster theory out.

Aaaaand then, having gotten such a great reaction from me when she gave me the father's day card, Margo decided to make a father's day card for mama. Below is Mama and Margo. Both seem to have gotten their make-up done by Tammy Faye Baker before the sitting, and Donna, forever the prop comedian, posed with a toilet plunger on her head.


In any case, Margo is drawing. Grandmaman commissioned her to draw the bus on which she went to Parliament Hill, which she quickly started, but after about 10 minutes of furiously darkening a page with wax crayons, I asked her how it was going, and she said that she was still drawing the wheels.

...and then Maude ate the page, and a fight broke out. Margo isn't into destructive criticism. Maude is.

- Michel

Labels: developments

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 10:43 p.m.. You can skip to the end and leave a response.