fotoplay: in the hospital 2

In yesterday’s post I wrote about one group of completed pages from the Fotoplay books I donated to my local hospital. As promised, this is the second post (of at least four) which features more works that seem to me to be related, in terms of feeling and approach to the page.

But this work, unlike yesterday’s–which was bold, creepy, and menacing–feels quiet, deliberate, spare, and relaxed.

It’s difficult to look at these pages (which were created at the children’s table of the emergency room), and not wonder about the internal experience of the child… Was the child who created this sweet, minimal fish not worried or frightened about being in the ER waiting room?

Or… did the act of drawing help to shift the worried child into a space of “decisive concentration”? I’ve written about the intense, focused, internal art-making space many times before– like here and here. Perhaps because it’s this creativity/process piece of the puzzle that seems to relate to the spiritual realm… incorporeal, transcendent, metaphysical… So when I see pages like these, there in the emergency room of a small town’s hospital, I can’t help but feel that in turning toward the photographic prompts of the page, a child might have moved into a small, private oasis, that asked for (and allowed for) total concentration, not to mention imagination.

So that works like the one above– cool, clever, graceful– flowed easily from the hand…

As did the drawings above and below…the page above with the sensitive choice of designing a bunny rabbit facing away from us, just like the girl…

…and this page, which completely stopped me in my tracks when I came upon it. The girl walking her pet, a jaunty bunch of grapes: Enigmatic. Charming. Wonderfully odd.

Which leads to this page, which might be called a tour de force, if you really picture that moment at the children’s table of the hospital ER, when one very wry, witty child chose to answer my prompt by placing the most perfect dollop of brown sludge between the thumb and forefinger of the man, and then, taking it all one step further, labeled it with its name: poop.

The drawing table, the Fotoplay books, the markers and crayons…it might just have been, after all, an oasis…