Draw for the Eraser
This past week I went on a trip to Mexico. I carried with me a sketchbook and some drawing supplies. My son, almost three, naturally was fascinated by the pencil sharpener. While waiting in the Dallas airport, he wanted to sharpen all of my pencils. Though I appreciated it, eventually that project had to come to an end. Next out of the bag of tricks was an eraser. Erasers can be a lot of fun. To remind him how it worked, I shaded an area of the sketchbook flat gray, then erased. He was thrilled. I handed him the eraser and I continued drawing. he proceeded to erase everything he could. I sped up a little to keep ahead of him. He sped up a little because it was fun. Soon we were both laughing, I was scribbling, writing, drawing, marking, as fast as I could. He was erasing as fast as he could. It was a beautiful couple of whiles. Always fun to share a genuine experience with another human, especially my son. Also, really fun to make marks with the assumption of erasure. It would be good to just take a minute and do this, (draw for the eraser) from time to time. Being a person who works with archival materials, I think the fun is amplified. An archival erasure... there's a nice irony there, that something was drawn and then removed while preserved on stable materials. When my pencils grew dull, we went back to the sharpener.