In defense of scribblers

I was looking after the girl with the dead fish again the other day. This time she was cranky. She stayed up too late and woke up too early, which, for a four-year-old, equals a lot of crocodile tears into couch cushions. We were painting. I started a portrait of her, thinking maybe it would cheer her up. Instead, I accidentally gave her an inferiority complex because my painting was such a masterpiece (no it wasn't).

Her plastic paintbrush clattered to the table as she wailed, "This is the worst day I ever had! I'm so bad at this and I can only scribble and none of my friends scribble and all my paintings looks so bad..." She went on.

I scrawled a loopy face onto the portrait in a feeble attempt to convince her that I still scribble too—only my scribbles weren't half as untamed as hers, which just upset her more.

"Listen," I said. "There are some very famous grown-up artists who only scribble. Do you want me to prove it to you?"

I was afraid she might prefer a noisy tantrum to art history. But she nodded, wiping away the fake tears she so desperately wished were pouring down her cheeks, and sat on my lap at the computer while I looked up Jackson Pollock. We scrolled through galleries of his paintings and she pointed out her favorites.

"Wow, this is just so beautiful," she'd say, laughing delighted, four-year-old giggles as pure as her scribbles. She was enraptured by grainy videos of Pollock and other painters at work.

I think sometimes we all feel like she did. Like whatever we're working on is just pointless scrawling, and maybe the canvas was better off blank before we came along and messed it all up. But maybe we just need to see it in a pretty new frame. Maybe our life-scribbling is worth a million bucks to certain art aficionados or to our mothers or to four-year-olds or to God.

We didn't go back to the watercolors again that day, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't because she was still feeling ashamed or inadequate. She was just an action painter.