Asher Lev is a young, imaginative boy with many different thoughts running through his mind, thoughts that should not be there as he is forced to see his mother sick and his family being torn apart by the seems. This overabundance of thought is common in all children, however the way they express those thoughts differs from child to child. And the way they display their feelings is directly associated with the means they have to display them. For instance, a boy with a piano may show his emotions through music while a girl with strong vocal cords may show emotions through screaming. In the case of Asher, all he has is a pencil and a few crayons and so he expresses himself through the many drawings he creates.
While Asher likes all of the drawings that he creates, he is not yet able to understand how others may react to his work. And this incapability is what leads him into getting scolded by his father, even though it is in no way his fault. On page 13, Asher’s father sees a drawing Asher made of his sick mother and immediately says to him "Asher, it isn’t nice to draw your mama like this." And of course, being only six years old, he does not know why his father would scold him for simply making a drawing. For he is still very much innocent and does not understand the facts of the world, the awful one pertaining to this situation being that people are extremely afraid of the truth and the accepting of that truth. Asher’s father was not yet able to accept that his wife was in this awful state of depression and so when his son drew it plainly and honestly, it opened his eyes to the situation long before he was ready. And such instances will continue to occur until he can learn to see in advance how the people around him will react to his work. Basically, he needs to learn, as awful as it is, to suppress any controversial feelings because they can only get him in trouble.
As the first chapter begins to come to a close, he starts to hear pieces of information about his father’s boss "killing" his uncle and such things and so he is beginning to lose his ever so fragile innocence. And while this is happening, he is beginning to learn those truths of the world and he is beginning to learn how his art will never be able to please everyone as he would like it to do. This upsets him greatly and is why, at the close of the first chapter on page 52 he says "I had stopped drawing".