When Geeky Artists Have Children...

Amalia and I spent a crazy amount of time playing with Play-doh today (and, no, not the make it yourself kind, which looks to take a lot of time and yields monstrously large amounts that would need to be stored - we buy those small containers so we can maximize on colors. When they dry out or become multi-colored mush, they get thrown out- it is cheap stuff if you buy it at the right places). Alligators, giraffes, pigs, bears, flowers, hair for all of the animals above, we were making a lot of things.

Then something happened. Amalia handed me the can of black play-doh. It was wonderful stuff. I squshed it on the desk and used a pottery knife to make all sorts of striations and lumps and patterns in it. At one point I had a giant glob that was full of little globules on the outside. Amalia looked at it and asked, "can I eat the blackberry?"

"Amalia, it's just Plah-doh. We can't eat it."

Amalia looks at me like I am an idiot, "Just pretend."

"Oh, OK"

Anyway, the black Play-doh is great fun to push around. The way light hits it is sort of interesting, too. I highly recommend getting a can and seeing the possibilities in it. I suppose the next step would be to translate whatever you can do in the play-doh to some more archival goo.

I was equally smitten with the metallic colors: gold and silver, but the novelty wore off and I was annoyed at the little glitter bits that I found all over for the next week. But there is something really beautiful with the black, sort of like playing with road tar or spilled crude oil (ah, memories, memories. May have been an environmental disaster, and probably dangerous, but playing with sea-water cured crude oil mixed with iron-rich sand made for a fun afternoon many years ago. I don't remember the source of the spill (undoubtedly a ship, don't remember the details, but one of the local beaches was pretty gooey for awhile).