Egg and Spoon

Origins:

"Through the Eyes of a Child"

When my nieces and nephews were small enough to rest easily in my arms, I used to carry them from room to room, walking slowly beneath the quiet glow of

the paintings hanging on my walls. There was something intimate and almost ceremonial in those moments — the weight of a child balanced against my shoulder, their eyes wide and unburdened, seeing everything with that startling clarity adults so often lose. I would gesture to a canvas and ask simple questions: Do you like this one? What’s this one about?

   I loved to do this precisely because children are unclouded. Their minds carry none of the elaborate explanations, none of the pride or self-consciousness that can dull an adult’s vision. They look at the world — and at art — with an openness that feels at once disarming and profoundly true. Their answers were always fresh, original, even surprising. It was as though they could lift a veil I didn’t realize I had drawn over my own eyes.

   One day, I lifted my niece Annie to the level of a painting I had made during my senior year at Southern Illinois University — Egg and Spoon. At the time I created it, I believed it to be nothing more than an exercise in composition. I had gathered a handful of random objects that I found visually interesting, arranged them for balance and contrast, and focused on creating a solid, simple design. No narrative, no metaphor, no hidden meaning. Just form, light, and the quiet discipline of a still-life study.

   Holding Annie close, I asked the same question I always asked: “What’s this one about, Annie?”

   And she answered with the kind of certainty only a child can manage — quick, bright, and untroubled by doubt.

   “Oh, that’s the egg race, Uncle Eddie! You know — they run with the egg to the finish line. Oops! He dropped it!”

   For a moment I simply stared at her, startled not by the whimsy of her answer, but by its startling accuracy — a truth I had never seen. She pointed to the spoon, the egg, the line stretched across the composition, and suddenly the painting rearranged itself in my mind. It was the egg-and-spoon race. Of course it was. How had I missed it? How had I spent years looking at a thing I made without understanding what it contained?

   In that small exchange — that simple, delighted declaration from a five-year-old — I felt a shift, quiet but unmistakable. Something within me loosened, the way a locked door might open with the gentlest touch. The painting I thought I understood revealed that it had been keeping a story all along. Not one I intentionally placed there, but one that emerged the way truth sometimes does: unexpectedly, honestly, through the eyes of someone unburdened by intention or technique.

   Through Annie’s gaze, I discovered the meaning of my own work — not a meaning I designed, but one the painting had been waiting to show me. It took a child to see the story in what I assumed was only structure. And in that revelation was a reminder both humbling and beautiful: that art, once made, belongs partly to whoever looks at it. And sometimes the smallest voice is the one that sees it best.

Ed Cepiel

2025