A really great demo day

Ha ha, it just struck me how this image reminds me of the Michelangelo painting "The Creation of Adam".  It's a crop of one of the paintings I'm working on currently. I'm writing about it because a cool thing happened with it today.  

I was painting on it as a demo for Portland Open Studios today. While I was painting, a little girl came up to talk to me.  I found out that she was four years old (almost five!) and has some water colors, which was really just a ruse to talk about her Calico Critters and then she said, "There's hands in the painting."  I told her I was thinking of painting over them, but what did she think about that? She said I should keep them, so I did.  I showed her how I saw a hand on the left side of the painting too, and I traced around it.  She said, "It could be like they are pulling on a rope." So I painted a pink line between them, but then I painted over it with blue and drew the zigzag line with the end of my paintbrush.  "How did you draw with that?" she asked.  I showed her how the end of the brush just scraped through the wet paint to leave the color underneath.  I could see her mentally filing that idea away for the future.

We talked about the structures on the bottom of the painting that you can't see in this cropped image.  She said they looked like castles in water, and that castles have drawbridges, so I attached a drawbridge to it. 

We talked about her birthday, her favorite dress, and then she told me about her ugly paintings.  She told me how she had painted her mom really little and herself really big, and how it was just VERY ugly.  I told her, I paint ugly paintings too sometimes, and when I do, I paint over them and start again.  At which point her Mom said, "Did you hear what Sam just said?  So instead of tearing up your paper, you could just paint over it and start again." 

The point of all this  is that inspiration comes when you least expect it, like when a four year old says something that makes me scratch a line in a painting and then the painting ends up reminding me of God and creation.  Or a little bitty artist person hears that every big artist person makes ugly paintings sometimes too, and the ugly painting doesn't have to freak you out.

Someday, after I have made this painting as good as I can get it to be, I'll put it in a show and dedicate it to this wonderful little girl, and every time I see it, I will remember what a cool little person she is and what she brought to my art on this day.