Some of you know that I recently moved from Chicago, Illinois to the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Texas. While we investigated the local housing market, we decided to rent a small apartment. Happily we've found a home, and we close on the 23rd of May, but we are still dodging packing boxes and enduring the heavy footfalls of our upstairs neighbors. In the meantime, my wife is doing everything she can to occupy our four year old son. He has taken to art, so Rachel has assigning him a variety of projects to keep him busy. He's done portraits, collage, finger painting, water color, and most recently he's been introduced to still life. Little Otto was instructed to pick a few interesting items from around the apartment and depict them. He drew a bowl of fruit, a beer bottle, a toy train, and evidently he found his way into one of my boxes and pulled out something that caught his eye. Here is what he drew: I'm not entirely sure he even knows what his subject matter was, but it was certainly entertaining to come home from work and see him hunched over his small desk, staring at a Stielhandgranate and doing his level best to capture it on paper.
A budding Picasso, I could tell it was a German stick grenade before you revealed it in the last line of your post.
Encourage his interest in art. You never know where it will lead. Two of my grandchildren, who are not "artists", had their pictures chosen as the cover for their elementary school yearbooks. Three of them had their artwork displayed in the district art show. Art is not their forte, but it is indicative of their range of interests.
Any quality of the art itself is beside the point in my opinion. He's just four but he did approach the task with a methodology. My wife instructed him to pick several objects in the house and draw them. The goal here was to break down the items into its sub-components, depicts each piece in turn, and assemble them to create the final product. I think you can see the process in the piece. As I mentioned, he drew several items around the house, and the fact he dug out my potato masher and drew it was just a bonus. Today my son spent some time with modelling clay. I asked him to depict a Stug III with Schürzen and Zimmerit, but he kept giving me very confused looks.
