Girl and boy art

I dropped by Anselm's school on my way in this morning to have a look at the picture gallery outside his classroom. Given my well-known obsessions with gender differences, I was struck by this particular juxtaposition. Admittedly the "girl" picture was probably the most stylistically advanced in the class, but the "boy" picture was fairly typical.

All the girl self-portraits had multiple colors, stripes, patterns or flowers in their clothes, while one boy added stripes and the majority of boys did not color at all. I was very amused by a picture in which the child drew himself as a 4 line stick figure, but behind him on the horizon was an elaborate ship, with funnels, windows and many other details. It reminds me of a conversation I had with Anselm when he was three. I suggested that he draw a person, and he quite crossly answered that he had already (in his life) drawn SEVEN people, which seemed to him quite enough on that particular topic.

He spent a lot of yesterday evening on a long series of tiny sketches of events in Zap's world, including space battles between the "Z" ships (the good guys) and the "X" ships (the bad guys, though noone gets hurt in the battles because the weapons are too weak). One picture was pure old-fashioned Freud: a rocket, pointing upward, with a cloud above, in which was inscribed: "BAM".