Distracted Dad
Richard Hearn on his boys’ artistic differences
OK, so the rivalry has started, and – typical – it’s an artistic one. Youngest™ and The Boy are following in the footsteps of the Venetians and the Florentines; the Impressionists against the Salon; Caravaggio against… pretty much anyone. A new chapter in the History of Art is being written.
This is how it works: The Boy painstakingly draws a scene – a circus, perhaps, complete with unicyclists, jugglers and trapeze artists, flanked by curtains lovingly coloured with red biro. He comes and shows us. His mistake is ignoring the lunge of Youngest™ whose love of rustling paper is only matched by his desire to give it a chew. (In a previous life, I think he used to run a ’50s fish ’n’ chip shop. This is the only explanation for the fact he thinks a newspaper is going to be laced with other flavours.)
So they battle over the same object, but from different angles. This is the case with any art form or criticism. Just as some people like Dickens for his rich comic characters and others for his social commentary, so The Boy likes his book of dinosaurs for the pictures, and Youngest™ likes to chew on the cover.
“The Boy likes his book of dinosaurs for the pictures, and Youngest likes to chew on the cover”
In every other respect so far, The Boy’s been great with his younger brother. Considering Youngest™ arrived exactly one week after The Boy started school, it must have been hard, but he’s adapted really well. Maybe at the moment, the age difference of five years means their tastes are too different. The true tests are yet to come.
In the meantime, it’s the creative art forms – whether 2D or 3D – that are proving contentious. It may not be plaster or clay as such, but let’s talk Lego. The Boy has suddenly reverted to Youngest’s™ baby version. The Boy had long since moved onto the older child’s small Lego, but now he’s rediscovered the younger stuff. (Nostalgia already, at the age of five, for toys he played with at three!)
So, although the ‘baby Lego’, as I’m calling it, has been good at keeping Youngest™ amused, The Boy has used up all the bits to create a futuristic church. Youngest™ looks at it and salivates. We explain patiently to The Boy, one, how good it was, and two, that we might need to break it up so Youngest™ can play with the pieces. The Boy went away. Ten minutes later he asked how you spell ‘break’ and then he came back with a drawing of a sign, cutting it out so it looked exactly like a piece of wood nailed to a stake. It said ’Do not break’. He placed it carefully next to his Lego church.
Youngest™ starts chewing on the sign.
