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Art is big in our world.

A recent piece by Dominic.

Dominic – our oldest – has always been obsessed with drawing pictures, usually inspired by whatever his current obsession is. When he first saw “Finding Nemo” as a little kid, he started filling post-it notes with pictures of fish both real and imaginary. When we got a Wii, suddenly all his drawings were characters from Mario games. But he also sometimes branches out into self-inspired work: comic books featuring himself and his friends, a guide to his own universe of characters (the “Characters of Doom” he calls them), stuff like that.

A recent piece by Vincent.

The younger one, Vincent, is more of an iconoclast. A budding Banksy or Warhol. There is not a surface in the house he won’t try to make his canvas, and scarcely a material he won’t try and make art with. Some his more infamous pieces include:

– Covering an entire room in baking soda so that he could make “clouds” by pounding on the couch and watching it float around the room.

– Somehow locating a box of those little “snap-it” firecracker things, and throwing them at the wall because of the “nice shapes” made by the gunpowder.

– Draping a stretchy rubber toy over the dining table to create a piece he called “November: Don’t Touch The Art Project”

So I guess the point is that is doesn’t take much to get kids into making art, and they can never have too much inspiration. For some reason St. Paul has always felt to me like an “art” city to me, so we decided to try and plan a day around being an artist for the kids.

Inspiration:

The Red Balloon on Grand. Bookstores are naturally more focused on the reading side. Most of them, including The Red Balloon, host numerous author readings, storytimes, etc. But some of my absolute favorite artists of any genre are children’s book illustrators like Calef Brown, J Otto Seibold and Lane Smith. So I think is a great place to go for pure inspiration.

Supplies:

First, a kid-specific store. Everyone knows Creative Kidstuff on Grand is probably the best place to go for creative toys and supplies for kids, and we’ll definitely stop there – it’s our kids favorite store. The hardest part is getting them to leave. But we’ll have to if we are to move on to other cool places.

Second, we’ll head to the nearby Wet Paint. Our kids tend to like grown-up art supplies even better than kid-focused ones, and a store like this like a candy store to them. We always like to have many different kinds of paper around the house – different colors, textures, sizes, etc. (mostly to keep Vinny from drawing on walls or other more interesting surfaces) and Wet Paint boast over 3,000 different papers.

Finally, for kids who think everything is an art supply, there is no more fun/strange place than Axman Surplus up on University. Whereas traditional art supply stores are great for getting what you know you need, Axman is all about grabbing stuff you never knew you wanted and figuring out what to do with it afterwards. Considering he’s already making conceptual installation art, this is the kind of place I could see our 3-year-old getting into big-time.

Coffee:

The cultures of Art and Coffee are inexorably linked, and our kids have picked up on this. Frankly they already have way too much energy so I would never let them near actual coffee. But a hot chocolate in a coffee-shop cup seems to work fine as long as they get to call it coffee and pretend that it “inspires” them. So we’ll prepare them for a future of endless hanging-out in coffee shops with other artists types by heading over to Bread and Chocolate for the world’s greatest chocolate croissants and warm drinks.

After all this, we’ll head home, dump out whatever we’ve grabbed and start making stuff.