Which comes first, the whimsy or the mama? One of the decided perks of having children is the way in which they reignite playfulness, a trait that gets turned off, or at least dimmed, in many people about the time they have to write their first resume. But have a baby, and you get carte blanche to make goofy faces and crawl on the floor. (After all, one synonym for playful is infantile.) A few years later, you’re reenacting entire scenes from Star Wars: “No Mama! You’re Boba Fett! Stop breathing like Darth Vadar.” And then it’s on to glue guns, cello concertos, and dramatic readings.
Some mothers tap deep into this territory, becoming not only creative but entrepreneurial. Before they know it, they’re making little t-shirts for their baby and every other tyke up and down the block. The cute onesies beget a stall at the farmer’s market; boutique-worthy pinafores find a home on Etsy; and wacky stuffed animals get hocked under a “Buy Local” sign at the toy store. Fathers get into the act, too. Famously, indie rocker Dan Zanes discovered as a father that most children’s music made him want to stick his fingers in his ears. So, he took up his guitar, rounded up some musical friends and recorded modern twists of the old Americana chestnuts he’d learned at sleep-away camp. “Pollywaddle Doodle” never sounded so charming.
Rarer, though, is the parent who still wants to paint onesies into the midnight hour once the kids are getting their driver’s licenses. The few exceptions seem to have been born with a sparkling inner tutu around their waist and a magic wand in hand.
One such pixie is Vicky Grube, who I met years ago at a neighborhood gathering where she was wearing a bear’s head hat. I don’t mean a fluffy teddy bear, but a toothy, shaggy grizzly. A painter and longtime preschool art teacher, Grube is now a professor at Appalachian State University. Her two daughters, Nell and Emma, are both grown and her official students are in their twenties, but Grube still finds time for paper maché and puppets. Several days a week, she runs after-school kids’ art classes, including drawing and puppetry, which are as much for her as for the kids. “Making art with children feeds me!” she exclaims. “Besides, you don’t usually get to make art with other grownups. They’re too busy paying their utility bills.”
As a trained painter, Grube has always found it interesting to watch a child paint and see what decisions she makes with regard to color and form. But she also began to find that painting—and other art making—is a very social activity for children. They riff off of one another and begin artistic conversations. In her drawing classes, when one person comes up with a new look on the page, other kids will want to mimic it. “If they think is really unique, they’ll say they’re copyrighting it!” Grube laughs.
That Grube’s own work has a fanciful flare is not surprising. Her art heroes tend toward painters with a faux naïve style. But how much of that bent comes from working with kids or being a mother is hard to say. There’s an unspoken dialogue between parents and children, teachers and students, she believes, in which both sides influence the other. “Would I have put on parades [Grube’s answer to performance art] with giant paper maché creatures if it weren’t for having kids?” she asks, and then shrugs as if to say, “It doesn’t matter.”
With three-year old Ruby in tow, artist Clare Crespo is closer to untangling her whimsy from her motherhood than Grube. “I was definitely into weird stuff before Ruby,” she says, ticking off some of her obsessions: crocheted watches—both analog and digital, dioramas, and food theme parties. Food especially was her passion, and she dreamt of making a career out of it but couldn’t quite imagine how. She held on to her “fancy” job producing music videos and commercials until she just couldn’t stand it any more and took the proverbial plunge.
