an afternoon with lauren.

lauren is my eight-year-old niece, my sister's youngest girl. last saturday i got to spend the whole afternoon with lauren at my parents' place in palmerston north. we did some reading and some crosswords for a while.

then lauren decided she wanted us to make some art. making art is lauren's favourite thing to do. when she and john first met he said to her, "i hear you want to be an artist when you grow up." she gave him a withering look in reply and said, "no, i want to be a famous artist."

lauren likes to dream big.

so we got out our art boxes, set ourselves up at mum and dad's breakfast bar and pretty much took over the dining room and most of the kitchen with our decorative papers, glue, scissors, rulers, brushes, and shape punches. "grandy" [my father] was lauren's able assistant with the scissors.

here is just a small selection of my decorative papers!

lauren and i both became very absorbed in what we were doing. we worked mostly in companionable silence but occasionally lauren would throw a question at me:

anne-marie, do you think it's good to be a complicated person?
anne-marie, why are the clouds white?
anne-marie, when you were at school were there boys who were mean to you?
anne-marie, why is john your boyfriend now instead of pete?

i believe that if a child is old enough to ask a question they deserve a proper answer, so these questions led to some interesting discussions. i had to admit myself stumped on the cloud question, though. we were going to look it up on the internet but we got sidetracked by our creative endeavours.

i love how fearless lauren is about her art. she never considers if it's good enough. she does it because it makes her happy. she has an idea for a picture and she doesn't hesitate to make it a reality.

it's a philosophy i'd like to apply a little more to my own life.

this was my abstract creation [the colours didn't photograph well] ...

.... and this was lauren's lovely picture, which will soon go up on my wall: