The artist at her work

As you can probably tell, this is my granddaughter at the beach at Avon, putting the finishing touches on her sea turtle made of sand. All of us scoured the beach for the fragments of shells that make up the turtle's back. Bea thought of giving it eyes, nose and mouth. The seaweed, presumably, is the turtle's lunch.
Words cannot explain how much I miss seeing her from day to day, because she's growing so fast and changing so much. I love to see how her mind works.
I brought a student paint set, some brushes and some watercolor paper to the beach thinking that if it rained, Bea would enjoy doing some painting. On her first try, she dipped the brush in black paint and applied it lavishly to the paper, creating a very large dark shape of many tones. She resisted (rightly, I think) my suggestion to add another color to her painting. She wanted just the black against the white. That picture is now on my refrigerator, where I see it every time I go into the kitchen. I see a lot of thought and direction in that black shape now. I see the dark patch in the middle of it and the lighter patches around the edges. It's very Zen.
On another painting, she painted one front and one hind leg of what I suppose was going to be a dog or something. She studied her painting intently, and then remarked, "The other legs are on the other side of the paper." Of course!
Last evening, I went with my friend Bonnie to a poetry evening at the Nasher Art Museum, which featured a lecture and reading by a famous American poet named Jerome Rothenberg. Dr. Rothenberg spoke on the poetry of Picasso and read some of Picasso's poetry and some of Gertrude Stein's poetry, as well as his own. As you can imagine, Picasso's poetry is utterly incomprehensible. Dr. Rothenberg, however, read it with such passion and vigor that the sounds virtually leapt out of his mouth. The result was that I as a listener began to feel, after a while, a pleasant heat in my brain, as if it had been vigorously massaged. I explain this by saying that when I heard these nonsensical poems, my brain lit up like a fireworks display frantically searching for some meaning or some connection in the juxtaposition of words. This seems to be the whole point. Dr. R. also showed us a series of slides depicting concrete or found poems, in which the poet/artist simply arranged letters or symbols or words on a page. If you didn't know it was supposed to be a poem, you might have assumed that it was a typesetter gone mad. Visual poems also included collages of junk and leavings and fragments of words and strips of newspaper and even twigs and bits of string. Fascinating!
What I love most about it is that Bea has been doing this sort of thing since birth. Wasn't it my Bea who snipped off the cat's whiskers? What better "word" for a poem, since cat's whiskers arouse all sorts of feelings in the viewer, to say nothing of the poor cat, whose face looked unbalanced for weeks until his new whiskers grew in. But such is art. Oy vey!