# Everything is a blank canvas to a toddler with a thick felt tip



**Séamas O’Reilly**

N

ot for the first time, I’m examining a picture my daughter has drawn. It’s an expressive piece, formed from purple marker, but presented in a larger format than her usual efforts. The effect is multiplying; there is a feral freeness in her strokes, a sense of passion at play, of creativity unbridled.

We are at my sister Maeve’s house, where she and her brother have been happily ensconced in a drawing session with their cousins all afternoon. Paper and markers and crayons are scattered in every direction, and each child’s own style is on display. For my son, the endless Minecraft characters and dinosaurs he can now reproduce with frightening speed and accuracy; for his older cousins Nora and Ardal, a menagerie of beautifully rendered characters from their favourite books and games. My daughter, however, has eschewed such figurative works, preferring to rely on pure expression.

Hers are a riot of thick lines and scribbled curves, born from a relatively recent conversion to creativity. She was slow to get the bug for drawing that my son has had since he was a toddler. I, too, was an inveterate scribbler and greatly regret I never really continued with the passion into adulthood. ‘Every child is an artist,’ Pablo Picasso once said. ‘The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.’ A philistine might say that task was made slightly easier in his case, once he decided he was allowed to put eyes and ears wherever he liked on a human face, but I abhor such cynicism and am bravely willing to state I think he was pretty good.

My own little Picasso is only starting out on her journey, but is definitely making up for lost time. Every nursery pickup is now accompanied by a bulging bag of art projects she’s undertaken and what were once tentative experiments now seem to be cohering into more ambitious, intentional works. Where once she might have idly daubed for a minute or two before getting bored, she now throws herself into the practice with obsession, her tongue sticking out of her tiny mouth as she conjures a riot of shapes and colours with her pen.

And this, her largest work yet, may be her masterpiece. I’m loath to ascribe genius to either of my children – save for when pride, or a deadline, demands it. But there is something about her unshowy brio, her effortless panache, that a less circumspect parent might term ‘casual brilliance’.

My sister, however, is unimpressed. To my shock, she regards it with scorn. ‘Dear God,’ she says, with something approaching disgust. I’ll admit to being mildly offended, since my sister is a lovely person and, moreover, a particularly fond auntie to my daughter. I accept I’m biased, but her complete lack of appreciation seems wildly insensitive.

‘How will I even wash it off?’ she says, examining the 5ft purple scrawl which, I might have mentioned before, has been applied directly to Maeve’s bedroom wall, extending from the skirting boards by the door all the way to the bookshelves facing her window. I sigh to myself, more in pity than in anger. As every art-lover knows, some people just don’t get it.

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