On Children‘s Creativity, Limits of Our Knowledge Banks, and Abstract Art
In the first post, I described how a fairy tale about an angry spirit inspired Doroteja to create original drawings.
In this post, I will explain in detail why this method is so effective in revealing children’s creativity.
Table of Contents
Are Children Naturally Creative?
Many people think that young children have an inborn skill of drawing creatively (with abstractions or geometric shapes), and, later in life, school and society negatively influences the child to transition towards a realistic drawing style. Realistically copying the visible world on paper is an honourable craft, but not as inventive.
However, child psychologist Maureen Cox investigated and proved this prevailing attitude to be wrong. To shift from abstract to realistic style is a natural development of children. Let me briefly describe it.
Stages of Child Drawing
At the very beginning, toddlers would be fascinated by the marks the coloured crayons leave behind, and that is how they play – by drawing various swirls and zigzags.
Once he or she would draw a circle, which would appear to be a similar shape of Mommy’s head. And after adding a few more dots and lines, an image of a mother truly appears on paper.
It’s astonishing to discover what an effective illusion can be created by crayon marks on paper. With age, the child’s body movement skills improve and become better controlled. This way the hand is getting better and better able to draw the simplest geometric shapes – circle, rectangle, triangle. It is these geometric shapes that a little bit older child uses when drawing his or her mom, dad, puppy or flower.
Over the years, children learn to control their hand even better. With practice, the drawing skills improve and the drawings take on more realistic details.
Seeing this, the child is naturally fascinated by the opportunity to be able to draw the visible world just like a reflection of a mirror. However, the photorealistic style of drawing is a skill that requires particularly a lot of time and practice. Thus, at this stage the child chooses either to stop trying (stating ‘I can’t draw‘) or not to give up and continue to practice. In addition, at this stage, the young person may become consciously interested in incorporating creative ideas.
Problem with Children‘s Favourite Drawing Ideas
My goal is to create a Neverland Portrait that reflects the child’s inner world. The experience inside our heads is radically different from the experience of the surrounding world. In our minds, time and space do not obey the laws of reality. An obvious example would be the capacity of our imagination during sleeping – our dreams can be astonishingly unreal. For this reason, it is important for me that the paintings are full of fantastical elements that could be an invitation to travel to our inner world.
However, a child, who is already well skilled in operating a pencil, aims to depict reflections of the surrounding reality. Similarly in Doroteja‘s case, one of her first drawings was a seascape with a flying bird in the sky.
It is a romantic image that reminds us of peace, tranquility, and daydreaming; as well as beauty, charm and grandeur of nature. While this image came to Doroteja’s head as the first thing she wanted to draw and could be considered very personal to her, such a landscape is charming for all people universally. In fact, the art world has seen this kind of landscape such innumerable times that now it is treated as a cliché. But let’s not say that to children so that we wouldn‘t disturb their enjoyment and innocent childhood naivety. Moreover, even the most worn-out cliché can be turned into an original work of art.
The Secret Behind Creativity and Original Art
There are many ways how to find original ideas for paintings. I never invent them myself, but only discover them by accident. My job is to simply create conditions (for both me and children) that would allow these type of ‘accidents’ to happen as often as possible.
Blocking Our Knowledge Banks
One of the most effective ways to discover original ideas is to prevent us from accessing our knowledge banks. What does it mean to prevent accessing knowledge? Usually when we look at a white sheet of paper with a drawing tool in hand, we ask ourselves – what would I like to draw? What would I be happy to draw? What would make me proud of myself? These questions lead to our knowledge banks or memory reservoirs. However, those places are not inhabited with unheard and unseen (otherwise – original) ideas.
The Power of Drawing a Spirit
What if I asked you to draw a spirit? Memory reservoirs cannot help because none of us have seen ghosts. At the same time, we understand that it is impossible to draw the appearance of a spirit. Therefore, all that is left is to search for ways of drawing that are unlike anything that already exists in the physical world. This kind of search opens up the door to original ideas.
Exactly for this reason the story about an angry spirit was so effective in encouraging Doroteja to search for ways of drawing something unseen and unrealistic.
Abstract Art – One of the Paths to Our Inner World
Although, like I mentioned in the first post, Doroteja didn’t know how to start, I showed her some ‘tricks‘. It was to choose 2-3 colours and draw an ornament of colours and lines. “Ornament” is just (I hope) a more understandable word for children to describe the abstract art composition. Abstract art often highlights the flatness of the paper and colours, thus, avoiding the illusion of the third dimension. This means that the drawing will only look like an arrangement of colour planes on paper, not an illusion reminiscent of objects from the surrounding world.
The abstract art style, which was drawn without difficulty by Doroteja, does not necessarily remain in our eyes as nothing but abstraction. On the contrary, it is probably impossible to create a painting or drawing that would not evoke any visual associations at all. Nevertheless, abstract art is one of the most effective ways to convey what is invisible – our inner world. (No wonder music is an ideal of abstract art: melodies and harmonies do not resemble anything from the surrounding world, but always evoke our inner feelings.)
In the second part of this post, I’ll describe another of my favorite tactics for creativity – quick drawing games. If it sounds interesting, follow me on social media or subscribe to my newsletter.
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