Picasso said it took him a lifetime to learn how to paint like a child.  The daughter of a friend of ours gave me a painting of a toucan.  I adore it.  He's got a huge green and pink beak which strides majestically across the top of the paper, a black body and an orange breast ingeniously shaded on the lower third to indicate three dimensionality.  His eye ring is grey and the background is orange.  He's out of proportion.  Feathers are not indicated.  The body is crammed into 1/4 of the paper while the beak takes up a third and the orange background has streaks and smudges going every which way.  Yet it works.  I would have been so proud to have painted it.  As it is I am proud it was given to me.  The artist is Isabel.  She's seven years old. 

Her work makes my work look contrived and laboured.   The spontaneity and truth of that toucan cannot be equalled by anything of mine.  A few years ago we attended a school exhibition of budding artists at the local shire hall.  I bought a painting for $30.  It's of three different parrots sitting on a brown branch with daisy like flowers floating in the air.  There is a green and gold macaw and a male and female eclectus (I think).  It is 'naive' and crudely done but it colourful and spontaneous and oh so right.  Again, I would have been proud to have painted it.  The artist, when I complimented her on her work, was shy and not inclined to talk.  I think she was about 10 or 11. 

Admiring these two paintings and their truth I begin to understand what Picasso meant.  Which doesn't mean I'll give up painting.  I won't but it will inspire me to keep searching for that inner truth which children access so well and which adults hide under a lifetime of learning and intellectualizing and bruised and/or well guarded ego. 

Dreamed of a willie wagtail which sat on my hand.  It was thirsty and put its bill in the corner of my mouth to drink my saliva.  I tried to make a self-waterer for it so that it could have clean water and not be dependent upon my spit for moisture.  That's all I remember of the dream but the image has stayed with me.  I tried to sketch it last night but it didn't work.  Think it needs a closeup of the lower half of the face and the bird positioned slightly different on the hand.  Very important that the hand is in view.  That's the only part of the sketch I'm happy with, the sweep and curve of the wrist and forearm.  What small things yet the grace and beauty of the wrist where it joins the hand is majestic. 

Have almost finished the man suspended over the vat of water.  No idea what it means, where it came from or even if it works.  It's very simple and pared down yet I like it.  There's something intrinsically attractive about mirrors, doorways, windows, rooms viewed from without, bubbles, reflections, water and 'dimensions' although trying to replicate three dimensions on a two dimensional surface is hard enough without adding a fourth or fifth.