The Colourful Forest

Kálmán is four years old. He explains angrily: “I can’t paint. I don’t want to paint. It’s a waste of time. It always has to be interrupted. I am drowsy, I’m going to sleep, or I have to go shopping and stuff”.

With a sharp pencil he draws a precise war factory in thin lines with six stick-men who are making war machines with precise attention. “Won’t the factory blow up?” I ask.

“Nothing is going to blow up” he answers “They have used it and will continue to use it”.

Paint is attractive and the strings of  Händel play on and on. Patches of colour are falling on the paper and Kálmán’s little hand is smearing the colours, brown, red, much green.

“It was forming, it was forming” he says “and then suddenly this is what it became: A COLOURFUL FOREST”.