A Spanish family stands outside the local panaderia, waiting in line for their daily bread. Two planes loom overhead.
A bomb is about to drop from one, but all the people in the picture look at the viewer, not the plane, oblivious to their imminent deaths.
Mercedes Arvalo's drawing of the above is part of a Hood Museum of Art exhibition titled "They Still Draw Pictures," featuring art produced by children during wartime.
While the exhibition is timely due to the war in Iraq, the Hood's curators have been planning it for two years, since before the Sept. 11 attacks or the beginning of the war, according to Juliette Bianco '94, exhibitions manager of the Hood.
Like most of the children whose work is included in this exhibition, Arvalo drew during the Spanish Civil War, lasting from 1936 to 1939.
Other drawings were produced in Kosovo and Yugoslavia in the 1990s and in Cambodia in the 1970s.
The children also appear to have come from equally diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.
Some children's drawings of their peacetime memories show working on farms or in their fathers' masonry shops, while one boy showed his family playing croquet in front of a formal balustrade.
The artists' ages range from five to about 16, and their skill levels vary accordingly.
Yet some of the youngest artists' drawings are the most moving, precisely because they are not realistic.
Miguel Angel Castillo's drawing of the evacuation of his village, all the human figures are disproportionately small, dwarfed by a large purple wagon pulling people away to safety and a single bright purple building standing in the village square.
The wagon and the building are the only colored objects in the entire picture.
The figures' size and colorlessness in the picture seems to hint at the dehumanizing powers of war.
Some of the drawings show the war in strikingly minute detail. A number of Spanish children rendered the swastikas on Fascist planes and uniforms, and others drew the red, yellow and blue striped Loyalist flag.
Ahmed Awad, age 14, produced a drawing titled "Checking the identity of the man returning from the marketplace, blindfolding another, beating a third."
Soldiers in olive garb are shown examining one man's passport in the lower left-hand corner of the picture.
In a second conversational group, another uniformed soldier holds a club over a blindfolded man, while another soldier points a gun to his chest.
A soldier in a third such group holds another man by his hair. Blood trickles down from a wound on his cheek into a pool on the ground.
A woman dressed in traditional Middle Eastern costume holds the soldier by the sleeve, seemingly supplicating him for help, while another woman visibly sobs in the background.
Despite the specificity of some drawings, they are grouped in ways that underline the similar ways in which children experience war.
Payam Napelani, age unknown, drew a vividly rendered war
plane flying across a bright blue sky.
The picture is strikingly similar to Alejandro Lazcano's larger-than-life red, yellow and blue Loyalist plane flying over a relatively tiny village underneath.
Other children take more symbolic perspectives on the conflict. An allegorical drawing by 14-year-old A. Guisanchez depicts Hitler and Mussolini as "Two big foxes running away from the war".
The foxes are identical-- they are shown with yellow heads, clad in red jackets, green pants, and black and white striped shirts. Cross-hatching beneath their feet shows the speed at which they run away from each other.
Yet some of the most moving drawings in the exhibition show these children's visions of peace.
Alejandro Chlian, age 11, showed a donkey plowing the fields near his farm, recalling the Biblical psalm about "beating swords into ploughshares."
And Felicia Blanco, age 10, simply shows herself quietly sitting on a hillside, reading a book.
