Unique gift wrapping idea

My daughter never takes chances with something as important as her birthday present. She and her mother always shop for it together.

At the party, parents sit in the rear, while the children celebrate. Before Ilona opens her present, my wife whispers to me, "She knows what's inside. When we brought it home she wrapped it beautifully herself." Ilona's expression would have fooled me. It looked as if she was seeing her present for the first time.

For kids, the unwrapping experience is just as exciting as the present inside the package. A child's wrapping art includes elements of ritual--finding a special object for a special occasion, selecting and customizing the wrapper and participating in an unwrapping event.

Their wrapping is an art; often the personal part of a gift, layered upon a store-bought object and wrapping paper. Typically, presents wrapped by children are like a richly decorated birthday cake; they have a decorative surface, topped with layers of candies, pictures, stickers and toys.

I am not a great help at children's parties because I am too busy admiring the packages and collecting souvenirs, such as torn-away wrapping paper or the latest cards, ribbons or place mats. These will all be featured in my art class. Piecing together children's birthday parties in our art class declares the legitimacy of this art form for other children.

SURFACE DECORATORS It's a painting, it's a collage, it's a sculpture--and it's a combined art of celebration in the form of an object gift wrapped by a child. Our unique class shop, "Wrapping, Inc.," has been inspired by visits to department store gift wrapping departments, fine paper stores and the neighborhood Box Shoppe. Of course, in every place we visit, we politely ask for samples. At home, anyone needing something wrapped in a special way asks a child to wrap the gift. In our art class, there are always plenty of unusual forms and job orders to challenge our resident wrapping artists.

Miniature toy cars can drive with wet, painted tires over unusual papers. Plungers, drain plugs, suction cups and parts of athletic shoe soles dance over plastics and fabrics. Sink liners and rubber gardening gloves await paper draping so their textures can be rubbed.

Found objects, ready-made stampers and cut stencils are all used to prepare custom wrapping papers. Unusual stickers fill small-parts drawers. Buttons, bubble-gum prizes, unusual adhesive bandages and even colorful plastic worms are stored inside the cubbies of our tackle box. We have the world's largest trunk of antique and new ribbons to sample. All kinds of surprise finds are featured as decorations on children's packaging.

Children's packaging is often a combination of unusual form and complex surface decoration. When my painting teacher in art school called me a great surface decorator, I knew it was not a compliment; yet, children's surface decorating is meaningful and significant. When kids decorate their notebooks, sneakers, pencil cases and packages, they are claiming every environmental surface as a canvas and laying the foundations for contemporary art.

When children decorate their windows, bulletin boards, switch plates and the ceiling of their room, they demonstrate the importance of beautifying, personalizing and caring for the environments in which we live. When kids create a beautiful package for someone special, they express a fundamental quality of art as a gift of oneself--an idea that tends to get lost in the adult art market. When we encourage children's surface decorating of small rooms, small objects or packages, we are supporting life-long art themes and commitments.

FORM DETECTIVES Outdoors, dressed in lab coats and wearing special gloves, students load our red wagon with unusual rocks, twigs, nests, moss and other surprises, all wrapped in foil, tissues or plastic wrap. We wrap objects to reflect on their sculptural essence, as the wrapping separates the object from its function or history. In play, we wrap hands, feet, faces and bodies, discovering the bases of such art as masks, or the art of draping clothing or creating gloves, hats or shoes.

We look inside children's lunch boxes for interesting wrappings and expand upon the theme by wrapping all kinds of unusual fruits and vegetables. We look at unusual wrappings of candies and admire unusual food wraps such as fast-food foil wraps and burger and fries boxes.

We explore indoor wrapping by packaging small items such as pencils and erasers, creating our own cases, as well as admiring classic pencil cases. We also wrap class furnishings, such as chairs and garbage cans, creating new and unusual outer skins for each.

Children, who masterfully wrap up small presents, also have greater dreams of wrapping up the world, larger ideas that are waiting to be unleashed. Young artists' big ideas need to be taken seriously.

Wrapping dreams need a respectable forum. In the art class, some of the greatest works can be created as ideas. For example, we might think about wrapping all the cars in the school lot in different-colored parachutes or wrapping shrubs in bright holiday wrapping papers.

Art as ideas can be written down, and for this purpose, we keep a "Big Ideas" book. In the book we list and illustrate the biggest, the most unusual and the funniest forms to wrap--as well as the wrappings that they will wear. The artist Christo must have been, in spirit at least, at all children's birthday parties. He would certainly get great ideas from our "Big Ideas" book.

WRAPPING-ART COLLECTORS Although beautiful art in itself, wrapping paper has not yet found its way into the great halls of museums, but it is getting closer by residing in museum gift shops. In our art classes, we share and respectfully display exceptional examples of wrapping paper, gift-wrapped items and shopping bags. We constantly look for the beautiful wrappers by which our world is covered.

We share and build on kid's collections from the smallest gum wrapper to see-through plastic bread bags. We collect illustrated holiday wrappers or unusual boxes. In addition to contemporary wrappers and unusual wrapping supplies, I enjoy sharing my collection of Chinese and Japanese wrapping papers and gift bags.

In art class, wrappings that we make or discover are discussed as art and displayed in our hallway gallery. An important role of the art class is to proclaim to children and adults the many forms that art can take and, therefore to constantly widen conceptions of art. There needs to be a place where the unusual wrappers that children pocket are taken seriously.

FINAL WRAP UP Few things are more exciting to children than birthdays and presents. To underscore how special the artworks we make in class are, we wrap them up to take home as presents. We create boxes, carrying cases, shopping bags and artistic wrapping for everything.

The scope of our experience includes the study of the outer skin and its importance to all visual forms, including buildings, sculptures, paintings, objects in nature and the human form. The pages of collectors' books bring to life the rich art history of wrapping paper and gift bags. Of course, children, as experienced wrapping artists, are celebrated.

Professor George Szekely is Area Head of Art Education and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.