Art for Art's Sake

Last Monday Alton and I experienced a Mommy and Baby first: our first art class. Yes, a baby art class. We signed up through our local Parks and Rec Center, and for only $6 we prepared to unleash our collective creativity. We were going to finger-paint the town red. In a multi-purpose classroom next to the pool, a large sheet of plastic had been taped down to the linoleum floor in preparation for "Itty Bitty Messy Art." We arrived a couple of minutes late and saw that mommy and baby couples were sitting cross-legged at intervals across the plastic, alternated with Chinet paper plates filled with a rainbow of paint colors, some fat brushes, sponges, and assorted little plastic toys. We squeezed in next to our good buddy *B and her mama just as the sloppy chaos began, woohoo!

The class description had urged parents to dress their baby "in old clothes or just a diaper--things will get messy!" I wavered on Alton's choice of outfit, but in the end opted for old clothes because the morning air and car were chilly even if the classroom might not be, and I was very glad I did. The crawling babies without pants on soon started to slip and slide on the paint-covered plastic, falling into the puddles of paint, and their mommies had to wade into the colorful fray to rescue them. One diaper-clad baby was extremely upset when he wound up with navy color spread all down one side of his body--he looked like a tiny aspiring member of the Blue Man Group. All of the paints were non-toxic, child-safe paints that were probably just some kind of sugarless pudding recipe tinted in various hues. This was for good reason, of course, because Alton saw this not so much as an "art" class as "bowls of gloppy food on the floor that I should eat" class. In a matter of seconds he had paint on his hands and feet, then started grabbing handfuls of paint that fell in cold dollops onto his pants as he went to eat it off his hands. I tried deflecting by handing him a paintbrush, but he viewed the brush simply as a spoon with which to shovel the paint in his mouth.

Now, just to explain, it's really not that I was expecting Alton in any way to paint something during this class. But I was definitely curious to see if he was ready to grasp the concept that the paint was on the plate, the paint was a color, and then the colored paint could be touched with fingers, maybe even see the painty fingers touch the paper. Early on I dipped my own fingers in some paint to spread it on the paper in front of us to see if he noticed the color, but I ended up wiping my hands on Alton's shirt as I continually picked him up to keep him from bulldozing paper plates and other kids--he has become something of an off-road crawler.
So anyway, he certainly got the concept that the paint was to be touched with fingers and picked up, but for this first artistic experience the focus was definitely not on transferring color. To Alton, all the paint was his favorite color: shiny.
Soon his pants were saturated, his shirt was streaked, and he had a smear of yellowy-orange on his forehead. The green on his fingertips led to a little smear of a Charlie Chaplin-esque mustache on his upper lip. Then the red paint plate came our way and Alton (somewhat reverentially) lowered his entire face down to the plate, and I pulled him back upright to find a perfect application of "lipstick" on his mouth. I laughed so hard I cried.

Eventually all of the paint colors had smeared together onto Alton's face/hands/body to form a sludgy brown color and it was time to pack it in. I swiped off the worst of it with a damp washcloth, but the genius of my "wear clothes instead of just a diaper" idea was realized when I could just peel off his colorful, squishy garb rather than stand at the classroom sink trying to wrestle a slippery baby clean in lukewarm water. He donned his warm sweatsuit and was home and conked out asleep for his nap before I could even think about giving him a bath. Eating paint is hard work! It was Daddy's job that night during tub time to remove all the art class remains still daubed on Alton's body, including swabbing the inside of Alton's nose, where the residue from his red paint kiss had caked and crusted until it looked like he'd gotten a bloody nose in some kind of bar fight. Our construction papers that we were painting during the class were so saturated with non-toxic paint that they were basically regressing back to wood pulp, so our only souvenirs were the photos above, taken by *B's mom Elizabeth, who was so nice to snap these for us since I forgot our camera at home. A very successful and fun day!