Monsters Will Teach You How To Draw

More accurately: they’ll *remind* you how.

I first heard this story on a Tara Brach podcast, but it originates with the late contemporary artist Howard Ikemoto. Here it is, in his own words:

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college — that my job was to teach people how to draw.

She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, ‘“You mean they forget?”

My own daughter, who will turn 3 in November, draws constantly, and always has, at least since she could hold a crayon. Her early artwork is black scribbles with bursts of this or that color. She’d stumble into the kitchen with her forearms and clothes covered in black wax. I felt very proud.

Now, she makes monsters. I’m using the word broadly: her obsession since last spring has been spooky things of all sorts — especially, for whatever reason, the basic-bitch vampire. But hybrids are also popular: she likes to do a vampire who is also a ghost, or a mummy who is also a cat. I’m lumping all this under the category of “monster,” although she also makes monsters (generic), and monsters who are bumblebees, etc. She does these drawings every day, for sometimes up to an hour at a time, filling books of once-blank pages with pumpkin-heads…