Our daughter’s school has a fantastic lunch program. We are certainly going to miss it when we come back to Canada. The menu, which is catered in from a restaurant, is healthy and diverse, but pizza Margarita is her favorite item. They had it for lunch today, which our daughter told us on the way from school. And then she added perhaps the best compliment my wife could hope for as a cook: “But you know, mum, I like the pizza that we make at home much better.”
Making pizza at home is our daughter’s favorite pastime. She always insists on picking up some pizza dough when we go to a supermarket. Ever since reading Pamela Druckerman’s “Bringing Up Bébé
Recently, I heard about a psychology study that counted how often children laugh in a typical day (by the way, the study of laughter is called 
and Maggiore. We didn’t want to rent a car, and the five of us do not move very fast on foot, so island hopping at Lago Maggiore was a perfect agenda – maximum of sightseeing with minimum of exercise. Still, it turned out to be a long day.
My wife and I are getting exposed to some 
. I should mention that my wife is not a fan of Warhol, to put in gently, and at some point we used to have heated discussions about whether the world had collectively gone mad in regarding him as a great artist (of course, recent developments in American politics have re-defined the notion of collective delusion and put arguments about art into perspective). Then, our daughter had another series of lessons based on the art of 
and 
. To be fair, the curriculum at 4Cats was balanced in that it also had a session on 
, 
and 
.
. In her school back in Canada, they used to paint ‘Kandinsky’s circles’ in the art class, so she was delighted to see a reproduction of the ‘Squares with Concentric Circles’ on the wall in our rental apartment here in Milan. When we saw an advertisement that a Kandinsky’s exhibit was coming up at Museo delle Culture, she was really looking forward to it.
”, where Tommy Lee Jone’s character, Travis Lehman, asks, pointing at a Kandinsky’s painting: “Those are nice pictures there. Did your kids do them?” When I look at my daughter’s drawings inspired by it, I can see why this is a cliche. The apparent similarity is a perfect illustration of the process of deliberate simplification that great artists like Kandinsky or Picasso go through. They converged on “child-like’ expressions not because they lack technical prowess, but because they eliminated all unnecessary elements in their art. In the case of a child, the process is very different, even if the results appears similar. She lacks the ability to include everything that she would like in her drawings and therefore settles only on the essentials. In other words, a five-year-old is limited by her technique, while the masters have come full circle to transcend the technique.
