Sons and Daughters Days

         According to some of those on-line calendar things, today is National Daughters Day.  Tomorrow is National Family Day, and National Sons Day is on September 28, unless it’s on March 4.  National Son and Daughter Day was on August 11.  It’s all pretty arbitrary and silly, but on the other hand, it makes as good an excuse as any to use my children as today’s theme.  Specifically, my children in relief block prints, of course!

        Not surprisingly, I get a lot of inspiration from the things in my life, and naturally the people in my life can be convenient models, as well.  (Consider the cat, too!)  So today I’m sharing some of the block prints I’ve made for which my daughter and son have served as models.  The first is one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever done, and was based directly on a few photos.  For both this piece and the second one today, what attracted me to the idea of making a block print on the subject is the universality of the experience.  I suspect that children everywhere and through all time have (if given the opportunity) delighted in playing in puddles.  Although the two children in the piece are absolutely recognizable as P

and T to any who knew them at the time, I think the fact that their faces don’t show increases the universality a bit.

        The second piece is also directly based on a photo of my son P, and the version shown here is indeed a portrait of him.  (You may also recognize the same plastic pail from the puddle picture!)  But in this case to widen the embrace of all children who have delighted in discovering dandelions, I also made a version of the piece with a brown-skinned, black-haired child.  You can see both versions and a little more about the 

making of the piece in this earlier post.

        Next up is a series of three pictures of myself with T and P, marking some of the highlights of a day.  The one in the middle, “Story Time,” was the first I made, and in it I’ve made T’s hair poking up wildly as it did for the first couple of years of her life.  By the time I made the second picture, however, (“Bed Time,” on the bottom) her hair had gotten longer and settled down, so the second picture  is a compromise.  Those two pieces were used as bracketing illustrations for my book of nursery rhymes, Hey Diddle, Diddle! and Other Rhymes.  The third piece of the trio to be made, which is “Busy Time,” shown first to the right, was made later, after the book, and by then T’s hair was even longer.  Although the characters are a little stylized and not “photo-realistic,” they include various references to our family, in addition to the hair.  The bed quilt, for example, is the one I made for my own bed, and the kids are tucked in with their favorite (at the time) stuffed animals: P with Edwin the elephant and T with Dusk Puppy.  (By the way, I’ve posted these pictures on Instagram along with actual photos of P and T, most of which show them a bit younger than they are in these block prints: Busy Time, Story Time, Bed Time.)

        Finally, I’ve got two more examples of the children as inspiration and models, but not being directly represented.  The Enormous Turnip is a famous folktale which includes a boy and a girl, so while the children in my illustration are not P and T, they are generally

based on the children I know best.  That’s also the reason I have two children, a boy and a girl, in my illustration of the verses from Isaiah 11:6-9 in the Bible.  (“The wolf will live with the lamb…  The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest.  They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain…”)  Of course I had to portray these children as my own daughter and son!

        Now my children are older, away at college, so I haven’t used them as direct models in a long time.  Still, they’re certainly a source of inspiration in all sorts of ways, and worth celebrating, however arbitrary and silly it may be to pick a random day in September to do it!

[Pictures: The Puddle, rubber block print by AEGN, 2006 (sold out);

Discovering Dandelions, wood block print by AEGN, 2016;

Busy Time, rubber block print by AEGN, 2007;

Story Time, rubber block print by AEGN, 2003 (sold out);

Bed Time, rubber block print by AEGN, 2005;

The Enormous Turnip, rubber block print by AEGN, 2008 (sold out);

Holy Mountain, rubber block print by AEGN, 2007.]