Sentimental Sunday: Nurturing Art

The Guido Project

Photos by Midge Frazel and Heather Frazel Sacco, 2014

At the end of this month, my older grandson, who is 5, will go to Kindergarten. By no means, he is a giant as we are a vertically challenged family and my readers will know he was a month premature. However, he is getting too big for me to comfortably hold him on my hip for any length of time. It is hard to believe how fast he is growing up!

He's an active little boy and he has many interests. Like me, he is not a big "foodie" but amazingly, he likes to cook.

When my daughter was buying things for their first condo, she bought this board print for her kitchen. Since they now live in a single family home, this simple work of art, hangs in the hall between the entrance to the garage and the kitchen. As you can see the man in the painting is making a pie. I spent a lot of time examining this and thought up an idea for nurturing my grandson's love of drawing and cooking. Of course, his man had to have a name so I searched for a name NOT in my family or my son-in-law's family so that no one in the  future is going to think of this as a picture of a relative or an ancestor. I call him Guido. Anything that begins with a "G" is hard to pronounce by little people. I thought if he heard this enough he might be able to hear the "G" in Grama and Grandpa. It is working.

I started by lifting him up and pointing to objects in the painting. Rolling pin was hard. The concept of making a pie was hard. But, he quickly got the idea of the table, the open window and the countertop.  

We don't "do Guido" as much anymore and it is time for me to start his little brother looking at it, I think. 

Colors, shapes and the artist's signature is something we are sill working on. He likes to point to all of the things he knows and tell ME about them now. That's fun. He told his other grandmother all about Guido. Family is a funny thing, don't you agree?

P.S. My mother was an artist and had a degree from RISD in Rhode Island, her mother was also creative and could play the piano "by ear'. Both of my grandmothers were good cooks.