Savoring Small Variations: Two Girls Painting Stories

Two girls enter the room. Two girls, three feet tall and four years old, enter the room. One sports a blue sombrero with a gold braid, the other a halo of pastel barrettes. The two stand behind easels layered with dry tempera from months of serious painting, paintbrush handles peeling like tree bark, and jars of thick conglomerate colors, the mouths of the glass receptacles swollen with dried tempera, fill easel trays.

Two girls enter the room and squirt red paint into jars of green and blue shouting, “I am making a swamp color.” These two don’t seem to mind that I follow them around, eavesdrop on conversations, and scribble while they talk. If I am three in one: an A/R/Tographer, which one of me trembles when aiming the camera? I stoop behind all the preschool painters, jotting down narrated easel stories. “Here are four bald men in a box.” “This is me peeing and this is my dog peeing and this is our microwave.” “This is my mom covered in zits.” “This is God wrestling Jesus. God is on top. You can tell because he has a beard. That’s Jesus’s mother yelling, ‘Stop!’” The cheeky paintings at the easel do not shock me. I have carried my daughter into an emergency room and bent over to wipe clean my father’s lips. Listening invites emotion, and the art room is no place to fill with cotton wool.

On one girl’s easel a delicate dancing red figure with tiny black toes and gold ears like a yak so fresh that it drips paint. As the second enters the room to find the other, I say “hello” and unclip the wet painting from the easel. One girl tells another that this paper man on tippy toes was Flash but to me he suggests Fred Astaire. This long-legged portrait is as inanimate as a stone yet radiates movement.

From the tray of paint, stories emerge that soak into the paper and dry hard. These stories describe feelings that are true for that child for that moment in time. Narratives painted at adjacent easels build an emotional connectedness between children as differences unfold on the full white sheets. In the proximity of the easels, each child becomes the audience for the other and connected to the world. A glance at the work of another proves that the body and the imagination can surely create aberrant notions. I am moved by both the small variations and the boundless differences between the paintings, and curious how the differences have such influence on what happens next (O’Sullivan, 2006, 2008). I hear: “You painted a green yard. A green yard. All green. Hmmm. I need to do another painting.”

Two girls whose pockets store tiny buttons, gum in silver paper, seeds, and jewels face adjacent easels. One begins to paint three large circles. “I copied this but I really didn’t copy it,” the one says to the other, “because I made lots of differences. Because I made this … you didn’t make the table.” The other begins painting the border of her paper, humming as her brush slows down at the top.

Two girls enter the room and with them come their curiosities, ideas, imagination, and reasons for things. They are observers of difference. “My God, who did this painting?” asks one. “I’m coming in to do something,” says the other. It is common to see one girl following another. Their friendship is casual. This inertia, this ease, creates a flatness of time, a peacefulness, and consequently a circulation of ideas. Seeing what another can do is a fertile field. When acted upon, the chronic is disrupted and sometimes, new habits are formed (O’Sullivan, 2006).

One girl holds a fistful of brushes perpendicular to the easel. Fingers clenched, she paints a multicolored spiral. The other peers around say, “Cool. Cool. Cool. I’m going to do that,” and also takes a handful of paintbrushes and whorls the paint. In this small studio, paintings exist as artifacts of the performative event of easel painting and...