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very early pictures

My father was an art historian, so many of my early drawings are on leftover quiz sheets from his classes. These works make for amusing juxtapositions of text and image. This one poses an interesting question, and at three-and-a-half years of age I rose to the challenge with a simple happy face, perhaps a premonition of years of contemplating vague and frustrating art history topics. My parents encouraged my artwork from an early age into adulthood because they felt that being an artist represented the pinnacle of success in life, whether or not one was recognized in one’s lifetime.

–Marnie Weber

Van Gogh, 1963; age 3

Right: Very Early Pictures Installation view depicting drawings made by artists between the ages of three and six, Arcadia University Art Gallery.

Photo: Aaron Igler.

Unless otherwise noted, works appear courtesy of the artists.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Polly ApfelbaumKjetil BergeRachel BlissShannon BowserElizabeth BryantCharles BurnsMason CooleyPatricia CroninDorothy CrossRussell CrottyTony de los ReyesTacita DeanWim DelvoyeThomas DemandDaniel DoukeAnda DubinskisMarlene DumasTim EbnerJoy FeasleyChris FinleyMathew HaleSteve HansonDoug HarveyMona Hatoum

Jim HinzJulian HoeberMartin HonertJim HouserTehching HsiehYvonne JacquetteKim JonesAlex KanevskyDeborah KassChristopher KnowlesGlenn LigonTristin LoweKerry James MarshallVirgil MartiSarah McEneaneyGerald NicholsDavid ReedMarco RiosKay RosenAdam RossEd RuschaHinrich SachsJudith SchaechterCarolee Schneemann Anne SeidmanRandall SellersJim ShawShelley SpectorPaul SwenbeckJude TallichetDani TullJeffrey VallanceMarnie WeberOlav WestphalenFred WilsonBarbara WoodallAndrew Jeffrey Wright

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VERY EARLY PICTURES was an exhibition of drawings (and some works in other media) made by sixty contemporary artists when they were children. Each of the 150 pieces included was completed between the early 1940s and mid-1980s by children between the ages of two and sixteen, all of whom developed into practicing adult artists.1 Opening in May 2005 at the Luckman Gallery (California State University, Los Angeles) and then traveling to Arcadia University Art Gallery (Glenside, Pennsylvania), the project built on the familiarity the show’s two regional audiences might have with the work of its participants, which included a mixture of Los Angeles- and Philadelphia-based talent as well as other American and international artists. (Monographs and exhibition catalogs set aside at each venue were available for visitors wishing to acclimate themselves with the mature work of the artists represented in the show.)

The juvenilia of adult artists is a subject crowded with myths of genius and documented histories. One of the most influential is that of Paul Klee’s unexpected encounter with his childhood work in 1902. At the age of 23, having returned to his parents’ home in Bern after four years of academic training in Munich and Rome, he went searching for some frames in the family storage shed.2 The drawings he discovered there, which he called “the most significant [I have made] until now,”3 prompted an artistic revelation that contributed to modernism’s exploration of the primitive. Vassily Kandinsky, Mikhail Larionov, and Joan Miró all collected the work of children and many other early modernists were inspired by such drawings, but Klee is among the few to make such instrumental use of his own juvenilia.4 It is noteworthy then to recognize that in the past several years the childhood work of a number of contemporary artists has materialized in projects and exhibitions, all with purposes and effects unforeseen by this earlier generation. In 2003 Glenn Ligon exhibited a pencil sketch of a jade plant that he drew when he was ten and, with Proustian intentions, had restored by a

Right (top): Very Early Pictures Installation view, Luckman GalleryPhoto: Josh White

Right (bottom): Very Early Pictures Installation view, Arcadia UniversityFrom left to right: Jim Shaw (age 13–14)Hawkman Faces 2 Foes at Once, 1965-66Jim Shaw (age 14) B&W Golden Age Heroes Copies, 1966Chris Finley (age 13–15) Krokus, 1984–86Chris Finley (age 14) Volcano, 1985Kjetil Berge, (age 14)Norwegian Landscape, 1971Gerald Nichols, (age 15) Garden Sketches, Ohio, 1954Joy Feasley, (age 14) Drawing of Van Design, 1980Photo: Aaron Igler

Below: Very Early PicturesInstallation view, Arcadia UniversityClockwise from top:Jim Houser (age 10) Space Battleship Yamato, 1982Polly Apfelbaum (age 10) Still Life, 1964, courtesy D’Amelio Terras Gallery, NY Tehching Hsieh (age 10) Self-portrait, 1960Elizabeth Bryant (age 10) Untitled (Bowl of Fruit), 1959Fred Wilson (age 9) Untitled, 1962Photo: Aaron Igler

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paper conservator. (Photographs of this drawing – taken both before it was repaired and after – appeared in the inaugural issue of D.) Martin Honert’s installations of the past several years (based on his childhood sketches, see page 102)5 and Wim Delvoye’s Early Works (2002), a lavish parody of an artist’s monograph that includes facsimiles of 264 works on paper he made between the ages of three and six, are two other vivid examples. These join a number of other projects and exhibitions suggesting more than a coincidental interest in the childhood production of adult artists.6

Very Early Pictures emerged from an impulse to build on these examples while generating an exhibition that could be documented in these pages.7 In addition to asking artists for self-initiated drawings done independent of school assignments or portfolio preparation, we solicited written statements reflecting on these works. Thus the exhibition granted viewers the license not only to enjoy children’s drawings they might not otherwise consider, but also the opportunity to study these drawings through filters not ordinarily applied to such material. Installed clockwise around each exhibition space according to the artist’s age at the time each work was made, the show also provided a chance to witness the year-by-year acquisition of skills and gradual expansion of repertoire across an international, collective continuum. Starting with a group of surprising variations of the archetypal “tadpole” figure,8 this evolution quickly becomes idiosyncratic as the drawings progress from a spontaneous, uninhibited language of symbols to one increasingly defined – and limited – by observation and emulation.

In many instances, the links between an artist’s childhood production and mature practice seem arbitrary or nonexistent. This was admittedly

It’s a funny thing to look at a picture that I made as a young boy and see within it the same concerns that I have now. This drawing portrays a scene from a wedding in which I was a ring bearer. It made no sense to me at the time that people should be crying at a moment that they were supposed to be happy. Of course I understand that now, but I am still trying to hash out the contradictions between people’s feelings and their behavior in much of the work I do.

On the good days I can think that I came to the earth fully formed. On the bad days it seems like I haven’t made any progress since I was eight.

Of course neither of these is exactly true. Maybe it is more accurate to say that I’m still trying to solve the same problems I was always trying to solve – problems of how to see what’s in the world and how to communicate it.

– Julian Hoeber

Wedding with Crying Bride and Groom, 1979, age 5

As a youngster in the early 1970s I was sick with anemia, very shy, and we moved every summer. I sought refuge in drawing, and made hundreds of narrative drawings between ages 3–7. My subjects were drawn from personal experiences and from what I saw on television and in magazines.

After watching a tv dramatization of the French Revolution at age 4, in a frenzy of traumatized fascination, I drew guillotines for months, much to my mother’s consternation. A family road trip out west in 1974 yielded subsequent vistas of the Rocky Mountains, campgrounds, forts, and Indians. Crude maps of the U.S., possibly inspired by issues of National Geographic laying about the house, presaged my lifelong interest in geography and topography.

In the mid-1970s, the American Bicentennial celebration was ubiquitous on television, in classrooms, and battlefield reenactments in the Philadelphia area. Inspired by this and by trips to Williamsburg and Mt. Vernon, I filled pages with scenes from the Revolutionary War, the life of George Washington.

Looking at these works for the first time in many years, I am struck by their unblinking eye for detail and narrative, their handling of cultural milieu. Now I remember the fierce attention and candor of youth, systematically crushed by compulsory education and abandoned to the numbing rituals, compromises, and accumulations of adulthood...rediscovered in daily battle by the artist all grown up.

– Randall Sellers

Colonial Figure, 1976–77; age 4–5

1. My mom is awesome for saving this stuff.2. I have no memory of making this.3. I don’t paint. This is a painting that I wish I could make, but can’t.4. Having seen the other drawings in the show, I noticed a direct correlation between some of the artists’ childhood drawings and their work as adults. With me, there is none.5. What interests me is what my motivation could have been at the age of 4 other than just doing it, and how it seems that my edu-cation and history have made it impossible for me to function in the same way.

– Marco Rios

Untitled, 1979; age 4

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the consequence of a selection process that was circumscribed by family background and fate. Most children – who can draw before they speak, usually as an extension of play – have no difficulty generating pictures. They are much less interested, however, in caring for their work, a task generally assumed by parents, who often become enthusiastic or reluctant archivists. Some participants, such as Ed Ruscha, had only one work to share, whereas others had hundreds of sheets to consider.

Certain examples stand out as evidence of surprising artistic or thematic continuity. It is tempting to regard the drawings of Marlene Dumas, Kim Jones, Adam Ross, and Jim Shaw as early manifestations of adult works these artists are still refining today. Mathew Hale’s graffiti on his Latin textbook suggests his longtime practice of working directly on book pages. His Latine Legamus also reflects impulses identical to those behind images discovered in the margins of a 16th-century Latin primer at the Royal Library in the Hague, sketches counted among the earliest drawings by children found.9

An anxiety about realism often prevents many children from developing their natural impulse to draw. Both Jude Tallichet and Kerry James Marshall refer to the televised tips from John Nagy’s Saturday-morning broadcasts of the late 1950s through the mid-1960s intended to quell this frustration. Nagy’s shortcuts to shading and perspective were not new to popular culture but may have helped to proliferate debatable standards. The statement by Dani Tull describing his efforts to work from photographs offers what may be a telling example of the effects of these criteria. In relation to current tastes, his portrait of his sister (see page 109) registers as one of the most contemporary-looking works in the exhibition. It also reads like a betrayal of an earlier mode of picturing that Tull seems reluctant, in retrospect, to have surrendered.10

Chief among the issues addressed by this project were the means by which we invest works with merit and meaning. The paradoxical status of these drawings – as both intimately of and independent from the art world – challenges assumptions that also contribute to our interest in them. Marnie Weber’s inadvertent answer to the quiz question about Van Gogh is emblematic of an indifference to discourse that is part of the charm of this work. Her disregard, however, was not only unintended but also never an option for her as a three-year old. The ironic humor of this drawing belongs to the adult artist Weber became. Separate from whatever meanings we project onto these works, it is difficult not to respect the desires and idealism that animate them. The immediate pleasures that are evident in their making serve as reminders about why we draw in the first place and the sometimes forgotten liberties the medium makes available to artists of any age.

Richard TorchiaExhibition Curator and Director Arcadia University Art Gallery

Notes:

1. In this context, it might be important to note the decision of performance artist Tehching Hsieh to stop producing work in 2000. (His self-portrait is visible to the far right of the installation view on page 92.)

2. Jonathan Fineberg, The Innocent Eye: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 82.

3. Paul Klee, letter to his fiance, Lilly Stump, 3 October 1902, in Paul Klee, Briefe an die Familie, Band 1, 1893–1906, ed. Felix Klee (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 273.

4. In 1926–27 E.L. Kircher produced a series of woodcuts based on drawings he made when he was three years of age. Fineberg, Ibid. p. 19.

5. This childhood drawing is the basis for Honert’s Bande [Gang], 2002, a sculptural installation featuring five figures made of painted plaster and a bicycle cut from steel plate.

6. Other noteworthy examples include The Early Show, which opened in October 2005 at White Columns, New York, and included works by over forty contemporary artists made before they entered art school. When We Were Young: New Perspectives on the Art of the Child will open in June 2006 at University of Illinois. Organized by Jonathan Fineberg (who lectured both at the Luckman and at Arcadia in conjunction with Very Early Pictures) the show will draw relationships between historical and recent children’s art and between children’s art and the juvenilia of well-known historical artists. Philadelphia Juvenilia, an exhibition presented at Moore College of Art and Design in 1991, featured over 300 childhood works by Philadelphia-based artists, including historical figures such as Cecelia Beaux, Charles Demuth, Thomas Eakins, Alice Neel, and John Sloan, as well as works by contemporary children.

7. The exhibition was also developed in response to an invitation from Julie Joyce, director of the Luckman Gallery, to curate a show for their program.

8. Among the most unusual in this group was an armless, two-legged figure with a form extending from its head. Drawn in crayon by the two-year-old Judith Schaechter, it was labeled “vomit drawing” across the top in her mother’s hand.

9. The only earlier examples of which Jonathan Fineberg is aware are the Onfim drawings inscribed on birch bark dating from 13th-century Russia. Paper, being a rare commodity in the 16th century, was not so readily available to children.

10. An early drawing of Tull’s depicting a figure wearing a sling is visible in the far, top right of the installation photograph on page 91.

In addition to thanking all the participating artists for sharing their work and written statements, I wish to acknowledge the generous support and collaboration of Julie Joyce, director of the Luckman Gallery. Without her curatorial encouragement and logistical support – along with the administrative help of her assistant Kim Bockus and the expertise of the Luckman installation crew – Very Early Pictures would not have been possible. For their technical support and goodwill at Arcadia, I wish to thank Shannon Bowser, Richard Harrod, Jane Irish, Tristin Lowe, and Jamar Nicholas.

I used to be in awe of a childhood friend of mine. He could sit down in front of a windmill (or rather THE windmill that was left standing for nostalgic reasons near our house) and draw it, and it would come out looking not just like a windmill, but like art. His parents were both painters and he grew up around their studio, so I guess he got a bit of a head start. He was also extremely smart and funny and handsome and spoke three to four languages (depending on whether you count Dutch and Flemish as separate). Today he plays saxophone in a Dixieland band at company parties and when a mall opens.

The idea of a life following a recogniz-able, sensible or poetic path is very attractive. It has the persuasive power of ideology. We spend a lot of money and even more time in dim places (movie theatres & therapist’s offices) to shore up such narra-tives. Looking at my childhood drawings, I am not convinced. I think they bespeak the time and culture I grew up in, and to some, lesser, degree my parents’ values and back-ground. If I put aside my desire to belong and to make sense, I can honestly say: I don’t know the child who drew this.

What the drawings may imply is the intersection I was parked at when I was five years old. I don’t think there’s a map on the dashboard with a route penciled in. But I welcome anybody to try and find it, if it makes them feel better.

– Olav Westphalen

Auto, 1968; age 5

Here are my future themes in alarming, predictive certitude. Within these booklets I find a simultaneity of events; narrative compression in implied filmic duration, flipbooks in which action enters the page as if frame by frame. A concept of space is influenced by time in motion. The page itself is treated as a frame in which each visual event is miraculously captured: drawing from life, dancing, travel, romance, cats, dreaming, parties, a funeral closely observed, weights, balances, the structures of tables, chairs, the mystifying staircase and the kinetic dynamic of the responsive pencil.

The selected drawings in this exhibit were made predominantly at ages 5–6 years old from within many lined notebooks. There are also two images drawn at nine years old found in a flipbook of sustained narrative featuring a cat “who goes every-where with Sue”.

– Carolee Schneemann

Funeral, 1945; age 6

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When I was six we lived on a steep hill in Pittsburgh, which was perhaps the start of my looking down (and looking up) view-point. A year later, we moved to another steep hill in Stamford, Connecticut. Later, when I attended RISD, I continued those angles of vision and began to make works from bridges, looking down. In New York City, ceiling paintings preceded working from airplanes.

– Yvonne Jacquette

Car on Downhill, 1941; age 6(drawn in crayon on back of door prize ticket 2 1/4” x 4 1/4”)

This is a portrait of my cousin Sharon who lived with us while she attended community college. I remember her using orange juice cans to curl her hair. She is depicted apply-ing lipstick while reflected in an ornate mir-ror. The way I remember it, she originally had a cigarette in her mouth but my teacher didn’t like that, so I changed it into lipstick.

– Virgil Marti Sherry, 1968–69; age 6–7 Collection of Virgil and Shirley Marti

One of my early pencil drawings shows a tv-transmitting station in Bavaria. It illus-trates my childhood perception of modern architecture, along with my interest in the challenge of depicting a structure as complex as a receiving dish. The American forces had installed these dishes not far away from my hometown in order to hear the whispers of the communists across the Iron Curtain.

– Thomas Demand

Untitled, 1969; age 5

When I was in kindergarten I was given a piece of paper with four letters of the alphabet written on it. I was told to think up one word that began with each letter. This was supposed to take an hour. Having finished in about five minutes, I asked my teacher to write out the rest of the alphabet for me. The next day my mother got a call from the principal of the school asking her to come in for a meeting. It turns out that a black child filling in words for each letter of the alphabet in a ghetto public school in the Bronx was considered a minor miracle and the principal thought she should me send me to a private school. My mother, recently divorced, could not afford a private

school tuition so was reluctant to consider it until my homeroom teacher said something that spurred her into action. “Your son might be smart here,” my homeroom teacher said, “but if he gets to a real school he might just be average.” It was at that moment that my mother decided that, no matter the cost, she would get me into a “real school.”

– Glenn Ligon

Alphabet Book. 1965; age 5Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

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It was pre-ordained that we would become friends because our older sisters were of an age and had already established the connection. I remember the eve of my first day at Ashford Preparatory School and my total excitement at the prospect of meeting Petronella. We were bound from the start, and inseparable. We invented our own realm and called it POWER. I was the King of Power and Petronella was the Queen. We wrote and spoke to each other in POWER. We inhabited POWER. It was our breathing, thinking existence for two or three years of intense friendship before Petronella’s father got a job in Brussels administering bananas for the Common Market and they abruptly left England. For a while, we tried to continue our cross-Channel communication, and once my sister and I visited them in Belgium. But the rupture was profound and losing Petronella meant, in the end, the loss of POWER.

I don’t know then what happened, only that a few years ago I was standing in my childhood bedroom remembering for the first time in a long while about POWER and Petronella. I had some small memory that I had concealed the POWER documents in the hessian protecting the springs under my bed. Encouraged to look, I pulled it out and there, exactly as that barely retrievable memory had indicated, amongst the cobwebs and the dead flies, were the POWER documents stuffed into the sag of the bed’s lining. It was a shock to find them, as it was a shock to wonder why I had hidden them. My parents were not ones for keeping our drawings, so the POWER documents and a few other extraneous bits and pieces that were in the same plastic bag are all I have. Funnily enough, it is not so much the documents themselves that make me imagine the artist of the future but the fact that I had sought to protect them.

– Tacita Dean Tacita Dean and Petronella Saville, 1972–77; (ages 7–11)Power Documents (folder cover and example of note)

This drawing was included with a letter that I wrote to my grandmother and grandfather to thank them for taking me to a movie in October of 1953.

– David Reed

Airplane, 1953; age 7 Collection Beverly and David Reed,San Diego

Going back in time, I can smell the peculiar but nostalgic scent of library paste while picturing myself in a classroom full of kids all clipping away with safety scissors, our tongues always stuck out the corners of our mouths.

– Ed Ruscha

Untitled, 1944–45; age 7–8

This drawing is one of four works by Barbara Woodall that was exhibited posthumously in Arcadia’s presentation of Very Early Pictures. It was also included at her memorial service in September 2005 at the Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia, where (three years earlier) she presented what came to be her last exhibition in her hometown. This solo show featured drawings and recent examples of the cartographic collages for which she is most recognized. The biggest surprise of this exhibition was a web-like network of highways – each carefully trimmed from her collection of international roadmaps – that traveled from one end of a 15-foot wall to the other. Respectful of the miniature scale of their printed sources while commanding the actual space of the gallery, the piece was a sign of where she was going with her work and the new territory she hoped to cover. A graduate of Tyler School of Art (Elkins Park, Pennsylvania) she also worked as an art instructor in Philadelphia and more recently in Cairo and Helsinki. – RT

Barbara WoodallUntitled, 1955; age 7

At the age of seven I started Saturday art classes in Mrs. Wynn’s basement. She would set up a very simple still-life that we were to draw in pencil. The original drawing would then be traced and transferred to a sheet of construction paper and finished in pastels. After class, I took the pastels home and continued to work with them on my own. I had three German dolls that I considered very beautiful and played with often. Their faces were painted in fabric stretched across a relatively unarticulated papier mache base, but the dolls were very much alive in my imagination. My father coached a high school boy’s basketball team, and I would sit on the side-

lines desperately wanting to participate. This drawing – in which the girl dolls and boy doll play together – fulfilled that desire. I often imagined myself to be as small as the dolls. When bored at school, I would visualize myself climbing up the teacher’s desk and scampering across the chalk-trough of the blackboard.

– Anda Dubinskis

Beautiful German Dolls Playing Basketball,1960; age 7

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I found these notebooks in my father’s filing cabinet after his death. He must have recognized some talent in these drawings to keep hold of them all these years. Yet, when I had mentioned that I wanted to go to art school, he objected to it completely and said that I should do something that would get me a ‘real job.’

At school we had the option of illustrating poems we had transcribed into a notebook. This was voluntary and had to be done outside class time. Since my school did not have any drawing or art classes in their curriculum, this was the only occasion to be artistically expressive in a free way.

– Mona Hatoum

Poetry Notebook, 1960–62; age 8–10

Long, long ago Learn To Draw With John Nagy was a tv show slavishly adored by a generation of budding artists, including this one. Nagy was a kind of beatnik Mr. Rogers whose apparent goal was to teach us to make excruciatingly bland tributes to single point perspective. Perfect drawings for a perfect world. His instructions on how to make shadows in snow scenes were especially seductive for this kid artist; good shadows make everything super realistic. Left to my own devices, I seem to have been somewhat less successful in repressing my inner demons.

– Jude Tallichet

Learn to Draw with John Nagy, Mexican Scene, 1962; age 8

Drawings like this one, which I did at around nine years old, represented my way of fighting back against seemingly overwhelming odds. It gave me a way to survive (psychologically) in what I viewed as a hostile suburban environment. I was the only black child in an all white school and neighborhood in the 1960s. As I walked to school on snowy winter mornings, other schoolboys would lie in wait for me to pass. A barrage of snowballs would attack me, with no one to come to my aid. The suit would protect me and the cannon would vacuum up snow and shoot it out of the other end, rapid fire. I could never make a real suit or cannon. I don’t believe I ever showed the drawing to anyone. It did its job however, allowing me to beat the odds, if only in my own mind. Which, of course, is the reason I have saved it all these years.

– Fred Wilson

Untitled, 1962; age 9 Courtesy the artist and Pace Wildenstein, New York

Here’s what Hazel Koenig, my first grade teacher wrote on my report card in 1961: “Charles does very mature crayon work; his concepts and skills far exceed his abilities in other class activities.” Some things never change.

I remember sitting in class, looking around at other kids’ drawings and think-ing, “Mine’s a lot better than theirs. They’re just scribbling.” I guess I had more practice. When my older sister went off to school, I was pretty much on my own – there weren’t that many kids in our neighbor-hood. When I’d whine to my mother about having nothing to do, she’d cut up a brown paper bag and sit me down to draw. At that point we didn’t have a television, so I had to entertain myself by looking at books and drawing pictures. The books I looked at before I could read had a profound effect on me. My father owned some paperbacks that included reproductions of black and white comics from the very first issues of MAD when it was still a comic book. The images in those cheap paperbacks were so strong and creepy and because I couldn’t read yet, I had to create some kind of narrative for myself out of the bewildering artwork. The art was amazing, and I know that the look of my current work has a lot to do with staring for hours and hours at those comics as well as countless other books.

My sister and I would sometimes do drawings together. She would do very careful, elegant drawings and I would do a cruder copy of hers. Drawing is normally a very solitary activity, but I enjoyed the few occasions where we’d sit and do “stereo” drawings together. Later on in grade school and junior high, I would force my friends to do comic book drawings with me – super-hero parodies inspired by MAD magazine as well as our own horror comics based on the late night grade Z movies we’d watch. By the time I reached high school, I’d moved on to other interests – like underground comics and underground culture – but I was still able to force my friends into doing stoner drawings while Pink Floyd played endlessly on the stereo. Just about the only time when drawing is still fun is when I have the chance to draw with friends – it still hap-pens every once in a while.

– Charles Burns

Cat Club, 1964; age 8

I don’t think I’m involved in the problems of my childhood – I am indirectly, of course, but I’m not directly stuck in that emotional world. That is an important point. Child-hood is a theme for me not because I think my childhood was especially eventful, or bad or good; my childhood was exactly as dull and boring as every other childhood. Childhood is a theme for me because I think it’s important to discover what’s long past but still in the memory as an image. The memories that remain from farthest back become the most important for me.

– Martin Honert\

Untitled, 1961–63; age 8–10 Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

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WHEN IWAS 11my mother bought me a set of colored pencils which were so cool because when you wet the tips they made marks that looked like paint. I loved them so much that as they got shorter, I was afraid of using them up. I decided to save them, and I still have them to this day. You’ll notice the jumping horse drawing does not use colored pencils as its medium.

– Kay Rosen

Jumping Horse; age 10–12

In 1974 I won first prize at my local library in Brockton, Massachusetts, with this drawing. The prize, a hardcover book of my choice from the library, seemed like a million dollars to me at the time. I picked Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh.

I still love the drawing even though the front legs of the horse are too long, the neck is too short, the tail is too high, and the landscape is utterly bizarre. When I look at the drawing now, I’m impressed that it doesn’t look like the feminine doodles of a horse-obsessed young girl, but a substantially realized rendering.

– Patricia Cronin

Untitled, 1974; age 11

I think as a child you draw because you experience the wonder of seeing something emerge just from moving a pencil across paper. You make your own world and escape the world around you.

You want to produce stories like the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen could…and the fashion designers who dress ladies and the cartoonists who draw jokes, and the Bible that’s filled with lustful characters and tragic ones that perish. You want to create your own Adam and Eve, your own tree of knowledge of good and evil. I always drew figures and faces, not from nature but from my imagination and from the mixture of memories of popular illustrations that I grew up with. Even then, I never wanted to copy nature, I just wanted to understand (or “become”) my own nature. And I always enjoyed playing this way.

Nothing really changed much. It’s just that now people sometimes take art too seriously. To enjoy art , one has to enjoy playing too.

– Marlene Dumas

Miss World, 1963; age 10Courtesy the artist and Paul Andriesse Gallerie, Amsterdam

THE PEASANTS ARE REVOLTING Up above, in the trees that were bent and stunted by the wind sweeping up the Solent, we created a secret walkway to cross the school grounds in the air where high above the ground you could see the foam-flecked waves dashing themselves against the Needles. —Derek Jarman*

Like the young Derek Jarman twenty years before me I was sent away, as a small boy, to an obscure English boarding school called Hordle House. It was still Boys Only when I got there and there were less than one hundred of us, aged between six and thirteen. The school, therefore, escorted its pupils from the heart of childhood right up to, and sometimes over, the borders of puberty. As Jarman writes: “To have an orgasm with ejaculation was the dream of every boy in the dormitory, as it meant you were on your way to growing up.” I arrived as a nine-year old and left the day before my thirteenth birthday with that dream still unfulfilled.

The pathways through the tree-tops that Jarman describes so vividly, above, were still there in my time and in constant use; we called the area “Monkey Town.” Down below, the life we lived was the usual schoolboy mixture of friendship and cruelty, playfulness and boredom; and the crucible of my boredom, my inattention, was the latin lesson.

It was an offence against school property to deface our text books and that, of course, is why we all did it. The transgression involved in messing up the printed pages with our newly acquired ink pens gave rise, each time, to a brief triumph over boredom. What a luxury it was to concentrate, at last, as one drew. And that experience of concentration-through-revolt is something that I carry with me today when it is still the case that to begin a new drawing is a kind of “dare”.

Books form an ideal repository for private collections in two dimensions. I am glad that I stole my Latine Legamus, my “latin reader,” when I left. I like the drawings it contains and I find that I also like the boy who made them. Because of this, I was swept by fellow-feeling when I read another of Derek Jarman’s reminiscences: “Along one of the hedgerows which bordered the grounds were violets. I kept their whereabouts to myself, and used to press them between the pages of Caesar’s Gallic Wars.” We must have all been at it.

– Mathew Hale

*All quotations from Derek Jarman come from: Dancing Ledge, Quartet Books, London, 1984.

Pages from my Latine Legamus, 1972–74; age 8–10

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First wreck over the finish line wins.

– Steve Hanson

Untitled, 1973; age 15

I have been making cartographic drawings since I was about twelve years old. I have always referred to them as “the map draw-ings”. They emerged partly from an early fascination with maps, blueprints, and diagrams and as well as visits to my father’s office. (He worked for a large residential development company in Southern Califor-nia.) These drawings represent one of many early attempts to design cities and other urban spaces. I am still making variations of this work today.

– Adam Ross

Untitled (Map Drawing), 1976; age 14

I was lucky that my mother saved examples of my childhood work, not only is it a gesture of her overall support of my artistic bent (the word they always used was “creative”), but being able to see my juvenilia as an adult confirmed some of my worst/best suspicions about myself as an artist. Thematically, I show very little development. An overall interest in figures and psychology has always prevailed – with some themes surviving almost perfectly intact – people in coffins, miserable princesses and cats, to name a few. Having a gap between my adolescence and adulthood (maybe 15–20 years) before seeing the childhood images again, I had the luxury of forgetting them entirely and thinking of my mature work as something new and fresh! But I find it comforting to know that the more I change, the more I stay the same. My interest in these subjects could never be called superficial and it seems evidence of a deep well of inspiration that will never disappear. On the other hand, my technical abilities have improved – thank goodness! Although my parents thought I was good I don’t

think my childhood work stands out particularly as the work of a future artist. I believe that my obsession with certain themes and a tendency to be bored and lonely combined in a way to insure that I would practice drawing (and later stained glass) with the persistence and tenacity of a pit bull with a bone.

Looking back on my childhood drawings now is a way to reconnect with the time when my work was always “perfect” – a time before I had developed the ability to self-critique (which I do with extreme prejudice these days). It is a direct line to a time when my work had magical powers – when image and reality were interchangeable and a picture truly had the power to transform life.

– Judith Schaechter

Moon Colony, 1974; age 13

My best friends growing up were identical twins. I spent a lot of time in their tiny room surrounded by piles of comic books that covered the floor and prevented us from being able to step on the carpet. I remember the stacks being at least ten comics high. We would make up our own characters and draw comic strips.

I was known as ‘The Artist\’ in junior high and high school. I remember drawing many, many portraits of a skeletal figure named “Eddie” from Iron Maiden album covers (a heavy metal band from the 80s) over the face of the principal in yearbooks. During that time I got a job as a sign painter for the local little league baseball stadium and copied business logos on 4’ x 8’ plywood boards with enamel sign paint.

As a teenager I was into heavy metal and collected images from rock magazines like Circus. I wallpapered my

entire room from floor to ceiling with tear-outs from the pages. I made many drawings of heavy metal musicians – Motley Crue, The Scorpions, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest were among my favorites. My father had a stash of old Playboys from the early 70s that I discovered boxed up in the garage. I spent many hours drawing copies of the photos. I must have drawn the Volcano-Man sometime after Mount St. Helen’s erupted. (See installation photograph, page 93)

I went to the Art Center in Pasadena right after high school and am still paying off my loans to this day!

– Chris Finley

Playmate, 1984; age 13

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D Magazine 01 | 109

The earliest artworks from my childhood have always been close at hand. For many years their presence played an active role in my current art-making both as a reference point and as physical material. Two unique factors helped to preserve the works. First, I come from a family of painters and writers, so any dash of the crayon or jumble of words were preserved and considered as true an expression as anything else produced by another artist. Secondly, my grandmother, Clare Cherry, was an innovator in the field of early child development. She published and wrote many books about the impact of creative activities on the development of the two hemispheres of the brain. Naturally, I became one of her studied subjects. It was common for me to be set up in front of a 16mm film camera and studio lights with a feather duster, a tray of tempera paint and a roll of paper as big as anything that de Kooning was painting on. Also, there was access to an endless supply of experimental art supplies.

Looking through my art of age 2–16 for this show, I am thoughtful of the fact that it is the earlier “naïve” drawings that hold my interest the most. These works could be called pure and free of the inhibitions that come with age and the restrictions imposed by self-consciousness. It is the later works, made between ages 12 and 15, that seem less interesting, yet they are the most informed and were certainly produced with effort and concentration. This portrait, for example, is one of many I did based on photographs, which became my primary subject in an effort to render more realistically. It is based on a commercial headshot of my teenage sister who asked me to cover her name to protect her privacy.

– Dani Tull

Head Shot, 1981–82; age 15–16

Since my parents are snowbirds, I had no access to any childhood art they may have kept, so what I can provide comes from a cache of teenage art I’ve had for the last forty years. Most of these pieces are based around comic books, a youthful passion I’d just recently renounced and was needing to distance myself from. Combined with my limited grasp of Pop Art circa 9th and 10th grade (1966–68) and prior to the emergence of R. Crumb and the underground, these pieces show an attempt to find a place for all the embarrassing aspects and urges inherent in comics. I guess I’m still trying since my next piece involves a religious adventure comic book that disintegrates in a different way, and Hawkman turned up a couple of times in my last show.

– Jim Shaw

Melting Comic. 1967–68; age 15–16

My school consisted of two rooms above a real-estate agency in the middle of Cork City in the south of Ireland. Art was something that might happen at the back of the class. My interest was in narrative, the stories that enthralled were from the Bible and from Shakespeare; the Agony in the Garden, the fabulous miraculous towel of Veronica that “photographed” Jesus – impossibilities that contrasted with the constraints of the world outside.I knew very little of Macbeth, I had studied King Lear. The witches were wonderful, unconventional and powerful. They existed in a world outside the madness of royalty. They were not quite beautiful, but they dared bare their breasts and created potions that were magic.

– Dorothy Cross

Witches, 1972; age 16 Courtesy the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

When I first became interested in art, I was obsessed with discovering the secrets that made the work of the Old Masters so amazing. I borrowed all the “how-to” books from the library and read the biographies of Leonardo, Raphael, Goya, and others.

The first book I owned was a large folio on Leonardo da Vinci. I was taken by the anatomical drawings, which seemed to be the key to good figure drawing. Imitating Leonardo, I used a plastic skull from a hobby shop as a model for anatomical studies.

I attribute my interest in structure and analysis to the methods of John Nagy, whose Saturday morning tv drawing show emphasized building images from basic geometric shapes.

– Kerry James Marshall

Untitled (Skull), c.1970–71; age 15–16Courtesy of Koplin Del Rio Gallery, West Hollywood

This is a two-dimensional world of x-men ( x ) and dot-men ( • ).

X-men have black tanks, dot-men white tanks. Both sides struggle to dominate the space. The drawing can continue indefinitely.

Each side has its own city (fortress) with thick walls. Each city (fortress) usually has living quarters, places of worship, offices, factories, supplies and jails.

Areas external to the cities are composed of lakes, rivers, or oceans. Individual x- or dot-men and the tanks need bridges and/or boats to cross these bodies of water. Super-tanks can cross the water and their firing range exceeds standard tanks.

Range for black tanks and white tanks:

Range for super-tanks:

The elements are moved by drawing, erasing, and re-drawing elsewhere. Tanks can also move in a line throughout the maze of water and fortifications.

Defenders usually fire first, unless they are attacked from behind or ambushed. Each side has explosives at their disposal, useful for getting through fortified walls or in ambush.

Ultimately, each side can also build a super-cannon, capable of penetrating the fortified walls and with an unlimited firing range. Immobility is their disadvantage: super-cannons can easily become sitting ducks.

– Kim Jones

Untitled, 1957–58; age 13–14