Finger Painting

In kindergarten I painted with my fingers. I painted the sky as a blue stripe across the top, even though I knew it was wrong. Mingling the sky with all things under it just seemed impractical, and messy. I was deliberately abstract, even then. I suppose most kids knew the difference, that their stick figures with over-sized heads weren't literal representations of themselves. I suppose that many might even have known that their artistic choices reflected something more personal and private: their feelings about the world rather than the world itself. Self-expression at that age didn't require any special effort. Art was spontaneous and natural. We didn't know there was a difference. Everything was happening inside our heads. and reality, the reality that adults insisted on our knowing, occupied only a small corner of our imaginations.

For most of us, I suppose, the corner where we once kept all things corrupted by convention would come to define the boundaries of our imagination. We would learn that the walls protected us as much as they contained the dull and practical things we'd once left there as we wandered, innocently, outside. We knew the sky wasn't a ceiling, and that the world extended beyond the frame. We wanted to paint the walls and floor, our clothes, ourselves. The frame was an imposition which we allowed because it earned us praise. We learned to contain our imaginations and display it as a trophy hunter might display a severed head.

We knew, once, and perhaps only briefly, that the effort was futile and pointless. The imagination would never be reduced to convention, and the wilderness, once domesticated, was more dangerous than anything truly wild.