Truth in a Cliché
You've heard it. Maybe you've even said it yourself when looking at a modern artwork: "Ha!, even a kid could make that!" By now, that reaction has become so familiar it's become a cliché. Usually tossed out scornfully to dismiss a work for claiming to be a work of art at all, there is some truth to that statement.
Let's remove the implied contempt from the assertion and consider what truth it holds. It is true that there are sought-after qualities in children's art that typically are lost by most adults. What those qualities are and why modern art has embraced them is our focus.
Objective Reality vs. Subjective Perception
For many, good visual art equates to skill in copying an objective reality. Even though we all see things a bit differently from one another, some objective external reality we all share is implied. The prized skill is to make the artwork look as if we are looking into reality. This is a valued skill, and it can be trained; but it is only one in the many skills that contribute to creating a work of art. .
Personally, a focus on skill was so ingrained that, despite progress at one lauded art school, I enrolled in another academy to gain techniques of precision drawing and rendering. Like many, I was hooked on the idea that being a good painter required these skills. Oddly, I wanted these skills only to ensure that I could do what I did not want to do: I didn't want to copy external things or become a "realist" painter. But I did want assurance that any decision to paint my vision wasn't an excuse for deficiency or skill-avoidance.“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist." Picasso said that, and he'd been a child prodigy with full mastery of the same classical-realist art training I pursued as an adult.
In contrast to this classical-realist approach to skill training, most young children paint with little concern for copying skill or reality simulation. They paint what they see, but they do this subjectively. A person is larger than a tree if that person is more important than the tree. Young children also show remarkable originality in the choice and arrangement of their marks, shapes, and colours. All this happens before any training in school sets in. Using tools available, young children seem to know what they want to show. They get absorbed in the process of depicting how things appear to them, without worrying too much about how it will look to others. They don't seem to fret about skill or techniques until later years. Ah, there's the rub. Once children are schooled to think visual art skill equates to a photograph, many become reluctant to continue developing their own art.
What is Artistic Skill?
Picasso and many of his generation were trained and skilled in accurate copying and rendering. Perhaps early mastery of established skills propelled some avant-garde artists to explore further possibilities. This led to a re-conceptualization of what "skill" meant when creating a modern painting in the 20th C.
The innovations of Modernist painters presented new ways of combining painterly skills with a strongly personal vision, and it revolutionized how art was seen and made thereafter. This new outlook included the championing of "primitivism" (art outside formal art training). Children's art was respected as an expression of a percept unfettered by conventional teachings of how things should look. "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a life time to paint like a child" (Picasso).
For skilled artists like Picasso, displaying technical skill is the easier part of becoming an artist. The harder part is learning to paint with the freedom of intent, commitment, and full participation of children immersed in their activity . This process can and did lead in unexpected, unconventional directions.
Art Critics
Unsurprisingly, many art critics of the time responded negatively to these Modernist artworks as childish. It takes courage to show authentic art that shifts from tradition, whatever the historical period. Critics of his time described Paul Klee's work as "mad, infantile smearings" and Monet's as done "with the childish hand of a schoolboy who was painting for the first time".
Yet, Ruskin, a renowned art critic before modern painting hit the scene, declared that "the technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye.... a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour... without consciousness of what they signify". I came upon that quote in a beautifully illustrated book by Jonathan Fineberg, The Innocent Eye: Children's Art and the Modern Artist (1997, p.9). It contains many more examples than I provide in this column.
Paint Like a Child
Early in the 20th C, when they were trading paintings, Picasso chose Marguerite by Matisse, explaining that his choice was due to Matisse's key change of style influenced by children's drawings. “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up”, Picasso said. Matisse evidently agreed when he titled his retrospective show, "Looking at Life with the Eyes of a Child". He, too, thought artists must have this ability to express themselves in an original, personal way.
Few, if any, adults really do paint like children. That's because they are not children in their experience or expectations. For artists, it is also because most also have acquired knowledge of materials and skills in drawing, design, colour, and composition that cannot easily be unlearned. Even artists without formal art-school training, like Van Gogh, go through dedicated self-directed training. Many renowned Modernist artists can paint objectively if they choose. But they choose otherwise.
Do you think it's a no-brainer to paint like a child? Try it. If you demean child art, you might be embarrassed to try. But, If you do try, you'll realize something you've lost: You cannot un-know what you know! It's not easy to capture the child's vision. On the other hand, you may find in this exercise that you have re-discovered an attitude and willingness to play, explore, and create your own kind of art.
Looking at Children's Art
Family fridges are covered with it. We're not talking about child prodigies but about how ordinary young children (about age 4 and well before age 10) depict their world. They tend visually to depict what's important to them in what they see and think. By age 10, with education and established cultural traditions, many children become highly self-critical in trying to make things look more objective or conventionally real. That's what classical art academies train: objectively paint what you see. But younger children usually take an opposite direction, relying upon subjective perception of what they see. An appreciation of the validity of subjective perception led mature artists to look seriously at children's art. This, in turn, has profoundly affected modern art.
Artists Champion Child Art
Children's art has been of interest to educators and psychologists for at least two centuries. Its formal aspects (whether the figure has arms, etc.) have been used as indicators of intellectual development. Its content (depictions of family, a burning house, etc.) and expressive aspects (careful vs. messy, etc. ) suggest ways art can be clinically useful as a nonverbal communication tool. But the people who first championed the aesthetic or artistic value of children's drawings and paintings were artists.
Artists discovered the aesthetic inventiveness of child art while reflecting upon their own creative process. From their writings and public statements, we know that 20th century artists were looking for something to enliven an art world that had become too repetitious and academically predictable. They explored qualities of children's art and applied their discoveries to their own work. Many artists became avid collectors of children's art. Painters like Kandinsky had large collections of children's artwork, an interest shared by Klee, Picasso, Matisse, Miró, Dubuffet, and others. Later artists, like Keith Haring and Basquiat, explicitly collaborated with children in producing artworks. Others incorporated actual drawings and paintings by children into their work, including Francisco Clemente, Julian Schnabel, and Jasper Johns.
All of these artists had their own ways of working. But they all appreciated and adapted qualities of children's art for their own process and output. If there is a common thread across their very different adult works, it is the rendering of subjective experience using each artist's own expressive technique.
How Children's Art Influenced Contemporary Art
Looking at how children's art influenced famous artists helps us to recognize some generative roots of contemporary painting. Below is an example of children's art from the collection of Paul Klee beside his own painting showing a similar influence. Many more such examples are in The Innocent Eye, mentioned earlier.
Evident connections between the art of children and of established artists validates the even-a-child-could-do-it cliché in the title, but in no way is this construed in a pejorative sense! Instead, children's art is valued as a glimpse into the creative process and desired product of modern art.
Various motivations likely lead each artist to seek out children's art, and its influences upon their produced work also differs. But some distinctive features of children's art (below) are recognized to occur in much contemporary art.
Features of Child Art
Children, like adults, are individuals with different temperaments and expressive preferences. Given this, some commonalities found in studies of young children's art can be described. Here is my list of some basic features seen in children's art before age 8-9 and without art training:
Scribbling: the earliest drawn marks made in childhood;
Simplicity: a few marks stand for aspects being represented (two lines for two legs);
Selectivity: part of an object can be sufficient to represent it;
Subjective Viewpoint: how the scene or person looks to the child (not objectively realistic);
Placement of Objects and Details: according to importance they hold for the child;
Expressive Use of Colour: often vibrant and primary colours are preferred;
Schematic figures: by about age five, a typical way of symbolizing a human or animal is often established by the individual child, who repeats varies this with differences in details;
Perspective: usually frontal or direct profile view, little or no modelling of form or 3D space;
Composition: objects tend to float all over until about age five when a bottom baseline is used to organize objects.
The "Child Within" is No Guarantee of Good Art
An appreciation children's drawings and paintings helps us to understand the intentions of much modern art. The importance of connecting with a child-like approach has also helped artists to produce original works. Let's be clear, however. Not all child-like work is artistically good, just as not all classical-realist work is artistically good. Such judgments rest on the taste and sensitivities of viewers, and we differ.
Appreciating the value of children's art does not mean to equate their products with those of artists who value children's art products and process. A child typically could not produce a work by Klee or Matisse, for example. A sophisticated eye and hand is at work, merged with the vitality and appreciation of a child-like artistic process. Linked with that process is another critical ingredient: the artist's discernment: a quality that tends to improve with experience.
The Message
Truth in the cliché discussed in this post, emphasizes the value of children's art for art in our time. Being inspired by children's art has led in diverse directions. Such inspiration needn't be nostalgic nor impose innocence as an ideal. Instead, appreciating the qualities of children's art has helped broaden and sharpen diverse artistic perspectives on how to conceptualize and convey reality as we see it.
Children's art may serve as a truth-test for depicting what is most important to us in a way that expresses our personal experience. Whatever we value in children's art (if we value it) will be transformed by our adult experience, sensitivity and discernment into a new and original artwork with, if we're lucky, the vitality of children's art.
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