Kids’ Artwork… and what to do with it?

Since my son could first hold a crayon between his chubby little fingers, he has been producing mini masterpieces of art. There are vibrant paintings, simple drawings and playful scribbles. Some were painted using his fingers, others with a sponge and a few even with a brush. The Christmas collection is made up of cotton-wool snowmen and tinsel trees, while the Easter display features cardboard egg boxes that have been painted a bold yellow and shaped into daffodils.

There are geometric buses made out of cereal boxes, delicate hats created from coloured card, and abstract dried pasta collages.

And, more just keeps coming.

At first, I thought it would be great idea to create a home gallery, so started sticking his artwork to a plain white wall in our kitchen.  However, I made the mistake of securing these works of art on with blue-tack, which meant that they’d regularly peel off.  Our ‘feature’ wall did not look quite as striking as I’d hoped when bits of it started falling off onto the floor.  I was also forever picking blue-tack off my fingers, the pictures and the wall.

However, after a couple of months there was not an inch of exhibition space left available and with a pile of paintings still waiting to be hung, I started to offload a few to eager grandparents to take home and display proudly on their fridges. I stacked some on shelves, stuffed others in drawers, and tucked a few behind a bookcase.

Anything showcasing a young hand print, footprint or family portrait was filed away in a box and retired to the loft so not to get damaged.  There are a couple of dramatic self-portraits we love so much that we are going to have them framed, even though our then 4-year old depicted the Greek God(zilla) as having one eye the size of an orange and the other the size of a pea.

I can’t quite bring myself to throw the rest away; but I really, really want to throw the rest away.

But I can’t… can I?

I mean some of them are… *whispers* not even very good.

Some are just pages ripped out of colouring-in books and presented as accomplished works of art.  There is one that is just covered in stickers. Another clearly abandoned after just 2 strokes of the brush.

Every single one of them has been loved and appreciated at some point, so is it really so bad to banish them to the recycling bin now to make room for more progressive pieces to be added to the collection?

I.JUST.CAN’T.DO.IT.