Let’s talk about kids and drawing. Art is fun, non-critical and accessible to all children regardless of culture or socio-economic status. Art doesn’t require 4-color glossy printing, complicated instructions, expensive supplies or company. Turn off the T.V. and give a child a blank sheet of paper and a pencil and they will fire up their own imagination and draw something. Add a box of crayons and a vivid vision emerges as unique and individual as the child. It may not be anything we, as adults recognize, but the image, and sometimes elaborate story it depicts, are always clear to the young artist. Ask any child old enough to speak “What are you making a picture of?” And they will tell you! It’s not just lines and blobs of color to its maker. It’s personal, sometimes impossible and always sparkles with imagination. In the immortal words of Julian Lennon who told his dad John, when asked what he was drawing, “It’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds!” Well, duh! We, as adults, forget how to see beyond basic molecular structure. All the wonders of childhood are still out there if you can just remember how to see them.

Tessa drew this when she was four. I was amazed and said “What a fabulous cat!” She looked at me and said “It’s a jaguar.” Yeah it is! Why do we speak down to kids and their artwork? They are really way more sophisticated then we give them credit for.

I was lucky enough to see natural rock formation in New Hampshire dubbed The Old Man in the Mountain before it slipped away into a pile of dusty rubble. It was very upsetting to see something that had been a part of our continent for millennium vanish over night! Who of us is enduring if even that ancient stone man eventually succumbed?  It was a an extremely awe evoking phenomenon. You drove along the winding highway gazing up at the endless, unchanging bank of looming vertical granite. I always feared I would miss seeing him, that it would be too subtle to make out his features. Then suddenly, you rounded that corner and looked back at the mountain and to my utter amazement, every time, the granite suddenly twisted into an unmistakable profile. Half a mile back…nothing. Half a mile forward…again nothing. You had to stand at just the right angle and distance to see him. He was not subtle! The rocks could be nothing but a giant’s face. Who saw him for the first time I wonder? Ancient Americans lived all over this countryside. Did someone out hunting moose, back in the haze of antiquity, happen to look up at exactly that position and go “Whoa! Where did he come from?” It had to be unsettling! They had to go get someone else to come see it to make it real. I wonder if they were torn between validation and loosing the mountain man forever? He couldn’t know that the face was always there, hidden from every vantage point except this one single spot. I’m going to go with Sacred Spot. It had to be special and unworldly to every viewer. I felt that strange thrill eons later.
There are many websites devoted to examples of Simulacra.

Why couldn’t it have been the women who drew all those extraordinary wall paintings? After all they were the ones who stayed home in the cave all day with the kids. It was primitive school, maybe? “And so you see when you find one of these (Tapping giant painted elk image with carved antler pointer) you run up and twang with pointy, flying stick just like daddy does…see here’s daddy down here…” Well why not?

According to the Mother Goose Society (Yes there really is a Mother Goose society.)
“Who was Mother Goose? Many she’s and he’s—different writers—in different times. The term has been traced to Loret’s 1650 La Muse Historique in which appeared the line, Comme un conte de la Mere Oye (“Like a Mother Goose story”). Two French Queen Berthas have been conjectured as a “Mother Goose” but there is no traceable evidence that either was the reference in Loret’s remarks.

In 1697 Charles Perrault used the phrase in a published collection of eight fairy tales which included “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” “Bluebeard,” and others. Although the book was titled, (translated from French) Histories and Tales of Long Ago, with Morals, the frontispiece showed an old woman spinning and telling stories, with a placard on the page which bore the words Contes de la Mere l’Oye (Tales of My Mother the Goose). Perrault thereby set the stage for the name to become a household word.” (or is that a household bird? Honk. Honk)
Mothergoose.com adds:
“Most of the tales included in any Mother Goose collection–and there are many such collections now–originated in the distant past as folk stories told to children. If there were an actual mother goose, she might well have been an 8th Century noblewoman named Bertrada II of Laon who, in 740, married Pepin the Short, King of the Franks, and in 742 bore his son Charles, immortalized as Charlemagne, the de facto founder of the Holy Roman Empire. Bertrada, who was a patroness of children and provided her over-achieving son his only education, was known as Berte aux grand pied, or Bertha Greatfoot, or Queen Goosefoot.

Whatever Bertrada’s role, by the mid-17th Century a mythical Mother Goose–mère l’oye–was widely acknowledged by French peasants and nobility alike as a fairy birdmother who told charming tales to children. Some of these stories were set down in print as early as 1637 in Giambattista Basile’s Italian collection of stories entitled The Pentamerone; others can be traced to another Italian, Giovanni Francesco Straparola, whose 73 folktales collected in Facetious Nights (1550-1554) were a source for plays by both Shakespeare and Molière.”

It’ll start with this one, paraphrased, from Old, Old Fairy Tales collected and edited by Mrs. Valentine. Circa 1870

The Beautiful Red Dancing Slippers

Once up on a time a little girl was sad. She was sad because her mother was dying. She sat outside the cottage on the stoop with her head in her hands feeling very, very sorry for herself. A kind neighbor brought soup and bits of bread but her mother could not eat it. The little girl sighed, she was not hungry either. Why did her mother have to be so sick? She watched the village children laughing and running in the square but she could not join their fun because she was told to stay still and wait. Why did she have to stay still and wait all the day? Day after day, while her friends played? She could hear their happy voices calling to each other. They never called her name anymore. They knew she had to stay still and wait. Wait! Wait! Wait!

Wait for her mother to die. But her mother didn’t die, she just coughed and coughed. The cottage was dark and smelled like the bitter potion next to her mother’s bed. The little girl didn’t like the smell it made her sad. She tried to think of other smells- the soft, squishy mud where the stream trickled over the bright green shoots and bees hummed looking for flowers. The little girl thought she did smell that warm, sunny place for just a moment, but then the bitter smell through the open cottage door made her sad again. She wished she could dance. She loved to dance. But she couldn’t dance she had to stay still and wait. The little girl wished and wished and wished, three times, that she had a beautiful pair of red dancing slippers so she wouldn’t be sad.  The crooked, old crone, who made the children laugh walked slowly past her cottage. The little girl thought she would like to throw a pebble at the crooked, old crone. But just when she thought how that would feel, the crooked, old crone turned her wrinkly face her way and stared out with beady, bird eyes. The little girl didn’t like the crooked old crone and thought about the beautiful red dancing slippers.

Her mother coughed and coughed all night. The little girl laid still and quiet in the darkness. She wished and wished and wished again, three times, that she had a beautiful pair of red dancing slippers. In the morning her mother was very pale and the kind neighbor told the little girl to go outside and stay still and wait. The little girl went to the cottage stoop to stay still and wait. On the stop was a tattered shawl. The tattered shawl the crooked, old crone wore. The little girl pushed it off the stoop so she could stay still and wait. Out of the tattered shawl fell a beautiful pair of red dancing slippers. The excited little girl put the slippers on her feet. Her feet started to dance. They danced her away from the stoop and out into the lane. The little girl danced past the village children laughing and running in the square. They stopped to watch her wondering why she was not on the stoop. They knew she had to stay still and wait. Why was she dancing? The little girl danced joyfully through the village until she was so tired she danced home again. The kind neighbor was weeping on the cottage stoop. The little girl knew her mother was dead and wanted to kiss her check good-bye. She tried to take off the beautiful pair of red dancing slippers, but they would not come off. Her tired feet just kept on dancing. The kind neighbor told her to stop dancing and be sad. The little girl was sad but her feet would not stop dancing.

The village people all came to the cottage and told the little girl to take off the beautiful red dancing slippers. But the slippers would not come off and her feet would not stop dancing. The little girl started to cry already missing her dead mother. But the village people could not see her tears because her feet were dancing faster and faster.  The little girl danced behind her mother’s wooden coffin as it went into the church. The little girl danced down the church aisle and out the arch into the graveyard behind her dead mother’s wooden coffin. Her feet were so very tired but they would not stop dancing. She tore at the beautiful red dancing slippers but they would not come off her feet. All the villagers shook their heads saying the little girl was very naughty to dance when her mother was dead. But she could not stop. The sun set and the village went to sleep but the little girl was still dancing. Her feet were bloody now in the beautiful red dancing slippers and her tears blinded her eyes but her feet kept dancing- Farther and farther into the night the little girl danced and danced until she could dance no more. Her little body lay still and cold as a dark figure came out of the forest. The crooked, old crone slipped the beautiful red dancing slippers from the little girl’s bloody feet. As the crooked old crone wrapped the beautiful red dancing slippers in her tattered shawl she smiled.

I imprinted on this first exciting encounter with personal technology. (“But-I can say no more…” The Beatles- The Movie HELP! The Funniest underrated loop of Everything I ever say to work out an awkward situation. “But-I can say no more…”

I remember lifting the crisp cardboard, yellow and green, rectangular top box. (Such precise logistics-) And worshiping every Crayola Crayon color name:
The Exotics like- Prussian Blue, Aquamarine, Sepia, Mulberry, Mahogany, Thistle, Cornflower…Periwinkle?
Or the comfortingly descriptive: Lemon yellow, Forest Green, Orange, Plum, Sky Blue, Grey.

Then there were the angst driven Crayola crayon color choices: Blue Violet? or was the sky actually more Violet Blue? Or Red Violet or Violet Red? This kind of power to choose the precise shade and hue, of that illusive moment you want to capture in Art, has always been daunting! Is the growing plant colored Spring Green-Even if is a Pine? Are carnations always Carnation Pink? That seems unduly limiting. What color is Orchid? There are millions of orchids loose in the world. I don’t think one color crayon will be able to sketch them all in.

I was most intrigued by the shiny, metallic minerals. A Copper crayon, that was really copper, right? And Silver and Gold? I used my metallic crayon coinage sparingly-Santa knew if you had squandered your last years crayons.
Maybe just in a Father’s Day card or a letter to Santa pleading for a new Crayola Crayon 64 (With built in sharpener!) Box in my next year’s stocking.

What were those important items? Weapons certainly. But they were beautiful weapons. (Now there’s an oxymoron.) When you consider people got to own maybe 2 or 5 or 10 things. Each of those things was certainly very special. They were probably held and admired a lot. Treasured. Ornaments were apparently essential. There was always lots of jewelry and personal adornments. Stylish to its own time and fashion sense, but still desirable and lovely to our modern eyes. We still aspire to drape our bodies with the same sort of stuff, blinding sparkles and intricately shaped precious medals, dangling earrings for our pierced ears are as common now as back then. And solid gold is still coveted.

Oh sure, man has always loved extraneous ornament. Perhaps that is finally something that is inherent only to man. Natural embellishment seems to be enough to satisfy other life forms, but not man. We even project our love of decoration onto our animal friends. Do you think Poochie really likes wearing that little turtleneck sweater?

Bronze Age Horse ornaments found in Yorkshire England

People have always loved to fashion and craft purely decorative items. An artist embeds a little bit of his essence into a creation. And back when money meant nothing the artist’s labor must have been one of pure love… and then to have your finished work admired or even desired. Everyone just had to have one of Glug’s shell pendants! That’s where trade comes in. The artists probably traded with each other. You would have to get something pretty awesome for your handmade masterpiece. What was an opulent neck piece, or armband going for back then I wonder?

You can bet no two guys ever showed up at a party wearing the same mass produced helmet. 
Or a mirror carved all over with intricate swirling designs?