On Friday night, Emily disappeared into her room for about 3 hours, only emerging briefly and intermittently, looking increasingly like a chimney-sweep at the end of a hard day each time I saw her. My curiosity was, of course, piqued, but she refused to let me see what she was up to until she finished what she’d been working on. I was therefore floored when she brought this out into the living room:

(click for more detail)

It’s a stunning piece. She has actually been working on for much longer than the 3 hours she was tucked away in her room. A few weeks back, she asked if I had any sheet music she could use. We dug through my music drawer together, eventually coming up with some dense piano piece with lots of black notes. She tore that up and mounted it on a large canvas, tearing off the margins and tiling the sheets as densely as she could manage. Thursday’s 3 hour marathon was just charcoaling the image on top of the sheet music base.

Kathy was so impressed with the work that she immediately bought it from Emily and mounted it over the couch in our living room — a good step up from the refrigerator where the kids’ art usually ends up!

Emily continues to impress me with her artistic skills, not only because I completely lack them, but because of the increasingly ambitious and skilled work she is taking on, and because she continues to push herself and to get better and better. Great stuff!