Fingerpaints

Eighty-seven little girls and boys of New York's Dalton School last week hung up 160 brightly daubed sheets of paper in a strange art exhibition. There were weird cloud effects, mysterious lumps and sworls, curious beasts, grotesque faces, incised lines like vines and tendrils. Not a few were extremely effective. Outstanding fact about these colorful patterns was that they were produced not by brush or other tool but by the children's own chubby hands smearing liquid pigment on paper.

Fingerpainting, the process's official name, was evolved by capable, burly Ruth Faison Shaw at her experimental school for British & U. S. children in Rome. Her primary interest was more therapeutic than artistic. She wanted to give her pupils the simplest and most direct method of self-expression to avoid the element of fear induced by tools that the child feels incapable of mastering. Spreading paint with the bare hands was an obvious idea but ordinary paints have obvious disadvantages. Fingerpaints, Miss Shaw's own invention, are made with harmless earth, pigments and a cold-creamy substance, all of which washes instantly off. The mixture is sensuously smooth to the touch, comes in six colors, and may be licked or eaten with impunity.

To make a fingerpainting a large sheet of wet glazed paper is spread flat on a marble or linoleum-covered table and big blobs of colorful sludge dropped on it. This is sloshed about with both hands, the finger nails, even the elbows, without conscious effort at drawing, until the amateur artist likes the result. The teacher is then called and the work given a name--"A Greedy Horse with a Long Neck," "Men Fishing Before They Are Drowned"--and the picture, the table and the child set aside to dry. Inventor Shaw is extremely proud of the fact that after one little boy in Rome had fingerpainted strange monsters for two weeks, he was cured of stammering, quickly learned to read.

Among the fingerpainters at last week's exhibition were Composer Deems Taylor's six-year-old daughter Joan, and six-year-old Tanya Bogoslovsky, daughter of Educator Boris Bogoslovsky. Artist Bogoslovsky's creation, a thing like a jungle of twisted vines, inspired her to her first poem, which was attached to the picture: There is a man lost in the dark woods. I keep finding him and finding him But he goes again behind the dark trees-- Again and again.

He won't listen to me because I'm so little.

He is again lost--and I must go.

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