portrait of the artist drawing a portrait

Back when Jonah attended that other preschool, the one we left behind, he came home with a painting in hand almost every day. At his new preschool, for the first several months, this was not the case. We worried. We took action. We bought an easel, paints, et. al. and a compelling multicolored plastic drawer tower in which to stow the supplies.

Still, nada mucho.

We talked to his current preschool teacher who reassured us that his decline in output was nothing to worry about. He has been playing outside with the other kids his age, being VERY social and active. (Stark contrast to previous preschool which was the standard Montessori type with lots of individual activities and little social interaction – he may have been painting so much because he was lonely, or younger then, or or or….)

Still, things shifted, as they do. She introduced some recycled-found-object assemblage projects that have since yielded multiple egg crate and plastic container with bottle-cap wheels incarnations of trains.

She helped him draw his dream and wrote down what he’d told her it meant, and then stapled it into a book, which led to a prolific self-publishing phase.

For the most part, the output-on-paper during this period involved scribbles, squiggles, and lines. Recent occasions, the discernible representations of transportation vehicles (one with a face) were starting to emerge.

But on this day, something completely new.

It was morning. Jonah stood before the chalkboard side of his easel. Ordered us out of the room anytime we came near. He explained that he wanted to be alone.

And when he was finished, we were invited to view:

It is a portrait of Daddy, complete with accurate color rendering (given the limitations inherent in the chalk medium) of the pajama pants that he was wearing that morning.