"Yes, my Mom is an artist"

Notes from my delightfully sarcastic offspring, on growing up with an artist mother…

• Complementary colours were old hat before I was five
• One eye closed and fingers measuring the view means it’s going to be a long trip
• Seeing distant smoke and driving towards it to study the veld fire
• Artwork having seating precedence in the car
• Not knowing what to say when asked “are you an artist like your mother?”
• My first playdate and I come home to report that it was fun, but I don’t know where their studio is
• Fighting my way down the passage through a forest of paintings
• What do you mean I can’t doodle in class?
• Aprons behind the kitchen door, marked by more paint than food 
• Strange music
• "Can I eat this, or is Mom painting it?"
• “All fruit looks like vaginas”
• "Please fetch the cerulean blue plate"
• Knowing no one in your family will ever play rugby
• Painting the backdrop for the school play, everybody wins
• Squinting at me like I’m a painting
• "Is that painting of me; am I sleeping or dead?"
• Gallery finger food, Saturday lunch
• No Prestik, but kneadable erasers work too
• Living in a house that’s purple, but only we can tell that it’s not brown
• Never any HB pencils, lots of 8B and 2H
• Graceful, last-minute and relentlessly aesthetic approach to school science projects
• Home time and she is photographing the lichens on the trees in the school parking