Me just continuing the path set out by the incision sketches, my son claimed this was a drawing of a pipe. So I added the text balloon and introduced him to surrealism and image semantics…

Did I shake his innocence, replacing his reassuring world with arty abstraction? Or did I restore some innocence by making him look at the lines and shapes instead of what they might refer to? Strange how abstraction – a word often associated with moving away from the particular towards a general concept – can lead to immediate sensual contact with the material world. Or how the sensual makes sense.  The power of art over philosophy? Pre-linguistic cognition has a very pretty word in dutch: voortaligheid.

For those who wonder: the yellow overlay was done afterwards in Photoshop. My sketchbook is not that clean.