No. 28 Sharing Art

One of the first houses the little girl ever drew was when she was very little indeed. It was bedtime and because it was summer it was still daylight outside. Her bed was underneath her bedroom window and so, because she wasn’t tired, instead she lifted the curtains over her head (she was too little to be able up open the curtains) and leaned on her bedroom windowsill, reached for paper and coloured pencils, and drew what she could see. She drew the house across the road.

It was a newly build house, only a year or two old, and very typical of the 1970s. Although it looked like a bungalow, with the outside dressed in bright white wooden panelling, and the little girl couldn’t see the first floor windows from her room, she knew there were rooms up in the roof space as she had been inside and had climbed up the open wooden staircase. The family that lived there were well known to the little girl, and the mum and dad that lived there were friends with the little girls mum and dad.

The little girl’s mum saw the drawing in the morning when it was time to get up. Mum seemed to like the drawing and must have thought it was good because she took it across the road to show it to the mum who lived in the house and gave her the drawing. That was the first time the little girl’s art was gifted and shared with someone else. It was a new, strange feeling…but it felt good and the little girl wanted to feel that way again, and again.