Category: Avant-Garde

Vikings: “They’re cool,” says Freddy Age Seven warily, “but they’re not good.” These Vikings, though, are happy enough adventurers. Their tiny boat has a grin of its own as it rocks through the spiky waves. Rows of oars dip down into the sea and a strange, boxy, union-jacky flag structure surmounts the truncated mast. Loot,…

An enormous horse carries seven people in comfortable seats with cushy backs. He is led by a helpful cowboy (note the hat and spurs) whose expressive lasso guides the beast and covers the vehicle. The people inside have a range of emotional responses.

“It’s a grand old rag,” wrote Irving Berlin, but nobody wanted to sing it that way, so eventually he changed it to “grand old flag.” Freddy Age Seven provides a 9/11 patriotic montage with a giant Star Spangled Banner waving in the sky –okay, so it’s spangled with exactly two stars, but you get the…

Moseyin’ along in the wild west, this stick-figure settler encourages his stick-figure horse to keep it movin’. The stick figure wheels keep turnin’ over, bumpin’ along on the long line of holes in the printer paper, I mean territory. The stick-figure sky is bright blue, and the settler sings out, “My heart’s as big as…

As John Ruskin says in his 1857 work The Elements of Drawing, “Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colours variously shaded.” To the eye of a painter, everything is color-patch bumping into color-patch. At the thin edge where…

Freddy Age Seven turns his attention to the Brighty mythos, and decides that no straightforward illustration can capture it. Instead he approaches this epic with an entire suite of artistic approaches. His first attempt at communicating the power of Marguerite Henry’s Brighty of the Grand Canyon makes the Grand Canyon itself the star of the…

Here is a drawing of a giraffe by Phoebe Age Five. It conspicuously omits the main thing that we would expect to see in a giraffe image. Surely by its long neck shalt thou know the cameleopard; and if the neck be shortened unto vanishing, how shall it then be known? The drawing includes some…

Here’s some cheap pseudo-haiku composed in flight this week. Accompanying it is a drawing by Freddy Age Six of a green airplane flying from left to right, with a propeller spinning and a happy pilot head sticking out. I’m leaving on a jet plane. Don’t know when be back. Oh babe. Oh. I hate to…

Freddy Age Six, by special request, delivers a vision of heaven rendered in his medium of choice, washable markers. To what shall we liken the kingdom of heaven? Heaven (or, as the stylized swirly writing in the upper right corner has it, “heven”) is a kind of castle city. There are angels everywhere: I see…

Go ahead, Polly and Digory, take the ring. My preciousssss. No wait, wrong story.

You might want to study this one for a minute before I offer my interpretation of the drawing by a six year old. . Done? . Okay. It’s an American flag wearing a mortarboard, dancing and waving its hands. Its fingers are like bombs bursting in air, and its tassel is having a party of…