Category: Avant-Garde

What you get when you describe the story of Mansfield Park to Freddy Age Eight.

Phoebe Age Six has drawn three birds flying. She depicts each bird with a severe simplicity: Four ovals, two lines, and dot. The first bird gets a bit of special treatment: the two lines of his beak are expanded to be flattened ovals themselves. Each bird has its own minor distinctions, and the rapid loops…

Freddy Age Seven draws a remarkably accurate Titanic from memory: the color scheme, the tilted smoke stacks, and all. And memory is what it’s all about on this anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Highlighted against the stark white of a dramatically over-sized iceberg, the great ship goes down. In the background, the Carpathia…

The contour line, says Kimon Nicolaides in his classic book The Natural Way to Draw, is where the seeing eye meets the touching hand. A drawing made with a contour line is a drawing that touches the edge of the object represented, but touches it by proxy, with a marking instrument on paper. “Place the…

Prolific artist Freddy Age Seven has recently turned from single images to the demanding art form of juxtaposed sequential graphic narrative: cartoons. Here is an untitled composition in 25 panels that tells a pirate story. But it is no mere entertainment: it is both a searching study of human greed, and an exploration of the…

The stagecoach, horse, and cacti are all drawn in red, with sharp angles and spiky corners everywhere. I can testify that Freddy Age Seven learned some of this technique from books by Ed Emberley, who can teach anybody to draw simple symbolic forms. The spokes are sharp, the cactus needles (OF COURSE!) are sharp, the…

Phoebe Age Five recently accepted the challenge to draw 18 cats as fast as she could. She completed the task in well under five minutes, and the result is a set of cat drawings with a striking range of compositional choices. In drawing, composition is the art of arranging visual elements on a page. It…

Popular internet artist Freddy Age 7, in a rare signed artwork, pays homage to the first president of the United States (see Freddy’s extensive online art gallery here). Patriotic images, especially ones inspired by national holidays, are a staple of this young artist’s ouevre. This image features a George Washington figure recognizable by his white…

Knight versus dragon, but note how the dragon is a biped who seems to be communicating via sign language. His mouth is politely closed, and the flame shooting from his nostrils barely extends further than his claws. The knight, on the other hand, holds his means defense off to one side, and brandishes his weapon…

Freddy Age Seven interprets the great American holiday, Thanksgiving, with this image of mayhem. At first glance, I took it for a battle between pilgrims (tall black hats, blunderbusses) and indians (feathered headdresses, tomahawks, bows and arrows). But upon closer examination, neither side is clearly chasing the other. Everybody’s running to the left, firing bullets…

It’s got a geometric simplicity that is mesmerizing. The repetition of circular and triangular forms creates a visual field in which every line is significant. This is a front view of a steam train coming down the tracks, or at least trying to come down the tracks. SOMETHING is in the way, and the engineer…

It’s not exactly 36 Views of Mount Fuji, but this set of drawings by Phoebe Age Five does keep the viewer on the move. There is a dance between the human figure and the flowerpot that draws the viewer in. You realize that you are not just watching a person dance around a flower (which…