There is a picture made from a leaf and marker hanging on the wall above my desk.  At the bottom it reads Cayanne Love. Twenty five years ago I would have laughed at the simplicity of this picture. When I was 13 the walls of my bedroom were covered with posters and pictures from magazines, poems torn from library books and handwritten aphorisms I’d read. It never occurred to me then that someday they would be replaced by sheets of copier paper scribbled with crayon and haphazardly constructed pictures of foam stickers and cut out shapes.

For the past 2 years the walls of my house have become a gallery for the art of two aspiring artists, one standing on the verge of six and the other three and a half. What for the first months we lived here were bare have become a crowded gallery that pays homage to the day to day concerns of the very young. The walls are a blank canvas in themselves that have become bursting with life.

During this past summer is when we really began to fill the empty spaces.  I was unemployed and each day we did an art project of some kind. Now, with the girls in school most days, I find myself longing for the chance to cut shapes from paper or slip in a lesson on time by making a paper plate clock. Surprisingly I even miss the mess and inevitable spilling of painting. But maybe more then anything I miss the chance that art gave me to teach and interact with my girls on a very deep level. It made us the Three Mouskateers, as Cerise says, and showed them something I had forgotten how much I loved.

Still I never thought of myself as an artist.  I spent several years of Saturdays when I was a pre-teen at The Maryland Institute in downtown Baltimore taking art classes and alot of that had somehow laid dormant until I began to think about how to fill the hot hazy afternoons of an Eldersburg summer. The joy and pride that shines through with each touch of brush to canvas or crayon to paper even now brings a smile to my face.

I watch as the silly beliefs I had in art have melted like an ice cream cone in August.  The idea that art must have meaning or even have the veracity to cause a fundamental change in the world. Now I know that true art must before anything be an expression of joy and that is what my children exude in page after page of stick figures and scribbles that are roller coasters or castles. The walls of my house are the most beautiful walls I have ever been surrounded by, adorned with a thousand mystical stories that only I and my girls could retell.

A friend of mine came over and said “I don’t know if I’d let my children just hang pictures so haphazardly all over the house.” I asked “why, it makes them happy, but even more importantly it makes me happy.” My friend said “Well I like my living room to be my space, their room is one thing, but you have pictures all over.  Where is your space?” I thought about it a minute and said “This is my space, what else would I want to be surrounded by.”  Our conversation turned to where to have lunch but I kept turning over in my head the idea that you wouldn’t want your walls covered by a thousand masterpieces, that you may rather have blank walls staring at you.

Then it came to me, I have always loved to cover my walls with pictures and stories, it just took me growing up to find ones that truly made me happy.  Ones that were simply because someone wanted to put pencil to paper and create, without forethought to what was being done, lost in the process not the meaning.  I still have a copy of Elizabeth Bishops One Art on my pantry door and a poster of Professor Longhair behind my desk, but they are surrounded by pictures of princesses and our family that would only be recognizable to the hand that created it or the father who takes such pride in displaying it.