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Sources of Inspiration

© Joe Jeskiewicz

My wife works for a preschool. Children who, next year, will go into Kindergarten to begin traditional schooling of those K through 12 grades. I often go in to help how I can in the late afternoons when I get off work, so that I can see the kids and hear things like, "Who is your favorite pokemon?" "How many pets do you have?" and "Is that a real tattoo?". To these questions I have ready responses, "Pikachu or Pichu", "27", and "Yes". Sometimes however I am confronted with much more difficult questions, but nothing I can't handle.

For my efforts to be a grown up friend to these promising five year olds I am occasionally given gifts. What might these gifts be you wonder. These gifts are the glorious enterprises of young imaginations in gifted hands. They give me art. Why am I telling you this story now however? About a week ago, a class of students graduated, all of whom I knew and who knew me. And while I read a Dr. Seuss trilogy of books to entertain their exited minds, I was gifted with a piece of art from a young lady. Flattered I paused my reading to look at it and turn it every which way to try and figure out what it was.

Imagine if you will on a piece of dull light gray construction paper a blue misshapen hourglass a little more than an inch wide. The hourglass is on its side and about a finger width below that a red rectangle shape with slightly pointed ends much smaller than the hourglass shape. While I looked at it I imagined the sharp clean images of Peter Nagel's painting of women, solid and vibrant colors. A child next to me asked what it was and I said it was a woman's face to which the artist promptly relied, "No, silly, it's a house," pointing to the hourglass shape, " and a baby," pointing to the red object. She corrected the paper for me by turning the paper 90 degrees clockwise so that the hourglass was to the right of the "baby" and that's how I displayed the paper to however inquired about it further.

Really however it is many things. This wonderful piece of abstract thinking was, in Pablo Picasso's mind, brilliant. It was he who said something to the effect of wishing he could go back to those days of childhood wonder an imagination, back before our minds constructed forms of realism in our fanciful imaginations, where objects became things. Where styrofoam out of television packages can be a fortress for G.I.Joe, where a stick can become a sword, and a refrigerator box can become a transmorgifier (Calvin and Hobbes). This piece of artwork given to me by the young artist in the making, is a source of inspiration as so many pieces of art from a child's mind can be.

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