Friday, November 10, 2006

Coco update


Thanks, T-Bone, for your comment and request.
I probably should have regular days of the week for kid updates, since they tend to be the more popular entries anyway.
I feel weird about that, mostly because the blog is about me, dammit. But also because I feel I’m just transcribing what is happening around me without actually “being a writer” – but I know that’s crap. After all, it’s what I observe and make of it.
Since the “Coco update” seems to be my “Free Bird,” here’s something:
Coco’s teachers are impressed with his ability to squiggle out some letters. “Impressed” meaning: “We’ve got to tell this guy something positive about his kid, let’s agree on the ability to draw. He’ll buy that.” And yesterday he upped the ante by drawing Darth Vader (and himself and Madge). But he shouldn’t be taking all the credit for his Vader drawing – I taught him the trick. He asked me how to and I said, “The helmet is just an upside-down letter U. Then you put in some circle eyes and a rectangle mouth with lines in it.” And he bought it.
Again, I have ulterior motives. I can’t draw well at all – at least I don’t think so. But I can read art books (both history and how-to), and it appears that something artists (by this I mean skilled drafts-people, not people with enough guts to call anything they produce and aesthetic creation) do which others don’t is see the underlying shapes and relationships in objects (and then, of course, they have the ability to translate this vision into lines or colors on a page). So I figure if I point out breaking things into their shapes, maybe he’ll save himself a few steps in his development as an illustrator.
I figure another step is to not be stingy with sketches (neither in the “wasted” paper nor in the amount of sketches needed to work on an ease of making lines go together).
Anyway, enjoy his “art.”

And if you meant a health-update: Coco is fine, though he has a cold, like we all do. He is scheduled for a 48-hr EEG next week (one of the reasons I got his hair cut – that stuff is sticky). We’ll see how that goes. On the one hand, I won’t be blogging that weekend because I’ll probably be in the hospital with him (unless he switches to Julie – but right now he has requested me. Well, not me so much as my eyebrows which he still rubs for comfort.). On the other hand, I’m sure there will be plenty of material coming from that stint. You can already start wishing us luck for that weekend. It’ll be his first time off the meds since his seizures last March.

2 comments:

green clementine said...

Good luck Coco.

Anonymous said...

Glad to hear about Coco, we'll be thinking of you when it's time for the tests, although we think of all of you all of the time. As far as art is concerned remember Tante`s "punk, punk, comma, stritch drawings and saying?
Then I had to remember the art class that I took for faculty members from Mrs Beus Drawing using the one side of the brain (don't really remember which side it was). It was fun and I couldn't believe the things I managed to draw. Still have the book and my drawings somewhere in the cellar.