Picture a couple dozen preschoolers milling around, all dressed in little plastic aprons, fat paintbrushes in hand, waiting patiently (or not) for a chance at one of half a dozen double-sided easels. A handful of teachers kept us occupied in edifying tasks, soothed tantrums, and generally worked their early childhood education voodoo on us, at my preschool. The warm yellow walls held a bright world within, full of colorful (and practically indestructible) toys, construction paper art, entrancing mobiles, and all sorts of things designed to distract and educate the budding little people within. Art time was my favorite time.
I usually approached the canvas (well, paper) with nothing whatsoever in mind, except for the pleasure of being able to moosh the paint around and see what happened. The paints provided were tempera paints, thick and viscous, rather like a half-melted milkshake. If you mushed them around enough, they got frothy, too, the bristles in the brush working little air bubbles into the paint. At the time I didn't know how it happened, I just thought it was cool.
I didn't paint like the other kids. Their painting surfaces blossomed with lovely self-portraits, stick-figure family pictures in bright floral colors, pictures of their houses, their pets, their surroundings. They painted princesses, or maybe a dragon, or a big scary monster, or a tree. A few kids splattered some colors on the page, just experimenting for a few overwhelming moments, and then went off to play with the toy cars. Most kids used just one hand, some used both, or alternated. I was a little different in that I never really painted objects, per se. Instead, I mushed paints together, streaking one color next to another in a visual explosion of thick, bubbly tempera paint that covered the whole page. Looking back at my preschool paintings now, I am often startled at how I managed to fill the page with practically every color in the rainbow, mush them all together, and end up not with a muddy brownish gray color, but with swirls and edge effects where colors ran together but didn't mix. I am also often impressed with my sense of color as a little kid -- I seemed to know instinctively what colors would set each other off.
But I must have had some kind of idea about what I was doing in my mind, because one afternoon I managed to describe to a teacher what I was up to. On this particular day, I was busy happily doing my usual smoosh-painting technique. A teacher hovered nearby, helping kids with the paint, asking them what they were painting and so forth. When the teacher approached my canvas, however, I think she didn't quite know what to say. There was a pregnant pause, while she regarded my work. I kept painting. Then a few moments later, my teacher, hoping to find a way to praise me without indicating that she didn't have the slightest clue what the heck I was doing, said: "Well... that's very interesting... what is it?"
I paused in my work, regarding her askance. "It's a design," I said indignantly.
And the teacher, I think, became aware that this little four-year-old kid was on some level she didn't quite know how to relate to. She mumbled something about, "Oh... a design, eh? I see," and then wisely moved on, leaving me to continue working at my full-page abstraction, wondering within myself how foolish the adults around me were that they didn't know a design when they saw one. *:)