I started with a smallish circle. I’m not sure when I decided to make it a toe. I may have toyed with the idea of making it a finger, but ultimately toes won the day.
Little Piggies
12″x9″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block
The last time I saw my grandson, we played the Piggy Game. I’m not sure how common that is, but either my mother or father played it with me when I was a kid. The parent (or grandparent) touches the great toe for starters and says, “This little piggy went to market.” Moving to the next toe, the piggy narrator says, “This little piggy stayed home.” Continuing with a wiggle of the next toe in sequence, “This little piggy had roast beef.” And the next, “This little piggy had none.” Finally, on the pinky toe there is a pause before, “….and THIS little piggy went wee, wee, wee, wee, wee…. all the way home,” accompanied with tickling up the leg to the little one’s neck and head.
Will likes this. When I ask him if he wants to play ‘piggy’, he sits down and sticks his foot out, ready for me to begin.
I wonder if my grandson William would understand that my watercolor today represents a foot as seen from the front. Ernst Gombrich’s book, The Story of Art details the progression of how artists represented parts of the human body. For example, early Egyptian artists did not represent the foot as foreshortened in poses where foreshortening would have made sense. Instead, the rules of the time dictated that an iconic side view of a foot be drawn.
I wonder if the visual perception of a child develops in the same manner as the depiction of human form developed in the history of of art. Is there an analog to fetal development (‘ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny’) in the development of perceptual acuity.
Perhaps there are different ways of development of perception that correspond to different minds in a neurodiverse population.
I was reading an article that said our perception of everything is culturally based. I certainly think that’s true to some extent. We are always filling in the blanks with what we already think we know.
And I remember that piggy game. Universal. (K)
Thanks, K. I remember driving with one of my friend’s kids in the car. He asked me why the telephone pole got larger, the closer we got. He was already 5 or 6 years old. That really surprised me, since size constancy is supposed to develop earlier than that. It does make sense that immersion in a culture would skew perception in some ways; sometimes my perceptions are skewed immediately after reading an article or watching something on TV. It is all very fluid.