My favorite artist

A short celebration

Hey y’all,

“All children are artists,” Picasso said. “The problem is how to remain an artist once you grow up.”

“I never started, I just never stopped,” Captain Beefheart said of playing music. “Children, when they’re playing in the mud, what are they but sculptors?” 

Saul Steinberg said of Paul Klee and himself, “We are both children who never stopped drawing.” 

You hear it over and over from many artists. They don’t remember not drawing. All kids draw. Artists are usually just kids who never stopped.

I know exactly when my favorite artist started drawing. It was December 25, 2017. Jules Kleon was 2 years and 9 months old. Ever since Halloween, he’d been asking his mom and I to draw “x-rays.” (His word for “skeletons.”) He never drew any of the skeletons himself, he just wanted us to draw for him. Then, as if he decided to give us the ultimate Christmas gift, he picked up one of his new Slick Stix and started drawing skeletons on construction paper.

So it began and so it continued. He used to draw so much we’d sweep up the pages with a broom: