Betsy Ross sewing the first American
flag. This was a very unusual subject for a Canadian Girl.
I
am forever indebted to the friend who brought me a Paint By Numbers Kit
to
my Fifth Birthday Party. These
clumsy artistic boxes gifts were popular then. It was impossible to be
creative
on your own, which meant making
mistakes.
You
just followed
the numbers, and best of all, the
paints were truly messy and risky, they smelled the whole living room up
with oil and there
was the useless bottle of
turpentine, which most artists surely know adds even more mess.
Cleaning up with turpentine
spreads the stains even further.
Amid the other gifts this wonderful present stood out, as it clearly
caused me a leap up
from the artistic scale from boxes
of crayons and lead pencils.
Later
on as I opened up the tiny tins of paint I became intoxicated with the world of real painting, as the turpentine
too gave me a buzz, similar to my thrill of Christmas trees, with their pine resin.
I
was taken with the story of Betsy Ross, as I could see she too was
doing something fairly risky, sitting around
her own living room, probably
getting the adult world mad at her, as my mother cursed the child who
had introduced me to the
carpet staining world of oil
painting!
