Painting without influence

I recently watched a clip of Aelita Andre, 4 year old Melbourne based artist. I absolutely loved the footage at the end of Aelita brushing and dribbling paint onto her canvasses. She looked so focused. I was also inspired by the statement her mother made "I am scared to influence her". Wow! My painting experiments with Cakey have been very controlled – "choose 3 paints, here are the brushes, now paint ON THE PAPER". These sessions generally leave us both frustrated. So I thought I would take a deep breath and lighten up.

I gave Cakey six whole tubes of primary colours, a handful of different size brushes, a few different things to paint on (black and white card, small canvas, paper etc) and a bunch of plastic lids and containers to mix paint on and then told her to go for it. I had to bite my tongue not 'to influence'. She was busy painting black paint onto black cardboard and I was itching to point out that wouldn't work when she picked up the cardboard, flipped it over and pressed it onto white paper, producing a lovely texture. One hour later, she had produced 9 paintings, had used all the paint and was beaming. The whole experience was well worth the effort and I plan to do it again.