Awesome Artists

Bentley has been an artist for some time now. He does gel ink drawings, crayon drawings, painting, and watercolor art work. He often paints animals--in abstract form. Most all his current art work is abstract expressionism. It's definitely nonrepresentational and highly spontaneous, but he totally rejects the nihilism aspect that some abstract expressionists embrace.

This afternoon Bentley tutored Viva on her first crayon drawing. His work is in the left side of the drawing in green. Her work is in the lower right. She worked on her drawing for a while and then tried eating the crayons. I took them away.


Jake is a very energetic artist. He covered his paper in short order with lots of lines. I was very impressed. I think crayon may be his artistic medium!


Bentley produced one crayon drawing and two watercolors. He told us that the watercolor in gray and brown tones is of hippos.




I'm undecided whether his work aligns more with the action group or the color field group of the abstract expressionism movement. What do you think?

Here's a Bentley watercolor from earlier this week. His opa really liked the fall colors in this work.


Here are two paint on construction paper masterpieces that Bentley created sometime during the past few months. He likes to use a circular sponge brush to create geometric designs.



Kara purchased Bentley some tubes of acrylic paint today, so next week he will get to try out something new.

Hand Print Art

I am constantly inspired by all the great blogs full of ideas on cooking, crafting, child raising... it's a wonder I find any time to actually parent what with all the blogs there are to read (just kidding)!

That thought aside, art with small children is sometimes more work than it ought to be. I saw some fun hand print ideas for Mother's Day and wanted to give a few of the projects a try. I knew Bentley would count himself out as he doesn't like messy hands. I'm currently wondering if they make mini latex gloves for little hands - perhaps if his hands were covered he'd be willing to explore more dirt/paint/fun? Anyway - with no hands available from Mr. B that left me with the twins. Oddly enough they weren't really thrilled to have their hands covered in finger paint and then pressed on to paper - but they were good enough sports.

Without further ado, here is the lovely flower hand print art of Jackson & Genevieve:

Art for the New Year!

Bentley was in a creative mood yesterday afternoon, and he spent some time (a good 30 minutes, I'd guess!) creating this beautiful masterpiece to celebrate the arrival of a New Year.

I think he's very artistic! :-) And, since it's hard to tell from a photo, let me point out this was not simply a small masterpiece - this was a 18 x 24 inch creation. Now he just needs to work on a distinctive signature to autograph his works.

Bentley's Artistic Photography

Bentley took this picture on his Opa's cell phone last night. I think he has a future in the production of modern art, don't you?

Can you tell which baby this is a picture of? :-)

Bentley's Art Project

This past weekend Bentley and I went on an excursion to a toddler craft fair at a local church. I know I was being a bit optmistic thinking he would participate as he's still a bit on the young side, but I decided to give it a try anyway for the sake of new experiences.

It took me almost 30 minutes to drag him away from the basketball hoop in the front room... he was enthralled. I tried reminding him we have a hoop at home - but this one looked different, it had different balls, and it had lots of other kids around it, too. I couldn't compete with my logical arguments.

I did finally convince him to check out the different craft projects. He was interested in watching a number of them, but not too interested in getting involved - except for at the bookmark booth! Bentley made a bookmark for his Dad, and it was funny to see how adamant he was about the particular layout of his collage items. I was in charge of glueing them down and ended up scolded a few times when I wasn't paying close enough attention to layout. :-)

Without further ado, here's the masterpiece:


(I tried to dissuade him from throwing an alphabet letter in with the geometric shapes, but his artistic passion wanted nothing to do with my advice!)