Instrumentation - Solo Piano

Difficulty - Hard

Duration - ca. 6 minutes

I conceived the idea for Finger Painting during a long car ride from Disney World, Florida back home to Michigan. As I was sitting next to my five-year-old brother in the back seat of the car, he leaned over to ask me a question. He had just finished drawing a picture on his Etch A Sketch and asked me to guess what his drawing was. I pondered his question for a moment and then answered in a child’s voice. I thought it was a bad picture of a plane, but he went on to describe an elaborate illustration he saw through his own imagination. This amazed me. I thought, how brilliant it is that a child’s imagination, so vivid and so open, can see remarkable images with such little life experience. It made me wonder, what do children really see the world as? It also made me realize how closed-minded we all become as we grow older, leaving our childhood in the past.

This piece depicts a child finger painting, creating an array of scribbles and making mistakes. To adults the scribbles are all that is seen. To the child, as he continues to paint, he discovers a world of beauty and fantasy, diving in and conceiving a masterpiece in his own mind.