Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Q for parents of artists

Maybe not your cuppa and depending on your family might not be for your kid but this is my grown up sisters work ( I don't guess she minds me mentioning it or else she wouldn't have made a web page). http://asylumlabs.com/cast.html. It does not look to me like technical training has thwarted her inner child at all. I've mentioned before that I've got told in another forum that somebody believes teaching children art techniques robs them of their individual creativity expression and makes them all have cookie cutter boring kid artwork.  Which does seem to be one train of thought you could follow.  I believe the opposite. I believe that teaching allows kids the ability to express themselves.  Just my opinion.   

If you're looking for a little understanding then I sympathize with the nostalgia of things we've let go of.  We always let go of an awful lot when we reach for something new.  But it's always worth it because we can recognize old things when we see them again. 

A saying that agrees with my idea, "a teacher told one half of his art class to make only one clay pot but make the best, most perfect pot they could. He told the other half of the class just to make as many good clay pots as they could. Guess which students produced the best, most perfect pots? The half that practiced more and tried more often". So I personally don't think learning new common techniques will take anything away from innate ability. But I've seen a lot of posting that they personally think it does so YMMV.

LaTexican:

Your post is making me think!

I'm going to start a slightly different topic, or else I'll hijack here, but it's all your fault! Sheesh. All these people who make me think.

Funny...I just answered this (kind of) in the off-shoot thread not knowing about this one. I believe there is a vast difference between giving kids the proper tools to create (quality supplies, instruction into using them, knowledge of design principles) and making art a rote set of steps for everyone to follow to make the exact same product.

A sure fire way to ruin a child's artistic potential is to teach them that people are made of sticks and birds are made of V's - at least none that I have ever met.

Exactly, evemomma.

I noticed this in paying close attention to my DD's art classes over the years-- the ones that seemed to further her interest most were the ones that allowed HER to control her own expression.

The rules were questions for her to answer personally, not directives to be followed.

"What do you see when you look at a cat? What shapes do you see in the cat's ears? Its head? What shapes are its eyes?"

Not:

a cat's head is an oval, its eyes are smaller ovals, and its ears are roughly triangle shapes on top of the oval of its head.

The latter is the worst sort of way (IMO) to teach children to love expressing themselves through art. It teaches them to express someone else's vision. Not their own.

Community college drawing classes that my DD and DH have taken together have been TERRIFIC for her in this way-- the instructors have been marvelous about encouraging students to follow some basic guidelines about learning to work with particular media (helpful), but most critically-- insightful about ways of cultivating an artist's eye in seeing a subject. The best of those experiences and educators are not directions-oriented with an eye toward a particular product or even style.

I never realized that art teachers actually encouraged people to do their own thing like that until I saw it. It was really amazing, and it was like an epiphany for both my husband and my daughter (both perfectionists with truly vicious internal editors).

I'm not an artist, and most certainly not a parent of artists, but reading all these suggestions brought one to mind.

In the book, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", there is a description of a writing exercise given to a student who was suffering from writer's block. The assignment was to write something about the history of the town, I believe, and she couldn't think of anything. In the course of helping her find something to write, the teacher had her try writing about the college, to no avail, and eventually worked his way down through a particular buiilding on campus, to a particular wall, and finally to one brick in that wall. She came back with a paper written -- once she freed up her mind from all the things she was "expected" to write, all the things other people had already written that she couldn't match, and was able to focus on the subject of that one brick, which nobody had ever written anything about at all, the writing came to her.

I think I would have your daughter try painting or drawing some minuscule part of something like that -- something that she doesn't feel the pressure of copying the "expected" views of, and can just make something all her own. One petal of a flower, or the underside of a rock, or one square inch of the refrigerator door.

This reminds me of an assignment that a friend did in architecture school. They were to draw a scene, then draw a magnified view of a portion of that scene, then draw a magnified view of a portion of that scene, etc. I think there were five views in all. I know that my friend found it challenging, but it does sound like it could "free up" some art muscles to do all of that.

My DD8 is taking art lessons that teach a classic art composition technique that involves drawing a grid on the canvas and composing the picture by the grid. It is a painstaking process but one that many artists through history have studied and used. Her school art teacher told me that Picasso, for example, started out with extreme realism within a grid and developed cubism from that.

So far DD's studies have not affected her sketching and drawing except that her freehand is much more detail rich now. Modern and post-modern art have favored self-instruction rather than classical techniques.

There is no right answer in art, I suppose, just a search for some kind of truth by the artist through the medium and technique that speaks to them. If your artist is stifled by technical composition then it's not right for her but my DD 's art has been enriched by studying classical technique.

I think we may have gotten off track a little...she actually does want to learn better technique and has been asking to for some time. At the same time, she is able to see that her desire to produce strong technique and her inner critic are keeping her from being free and innocent and expressive as she once was. Does that make sense?

Yes-- complete sense.

That's why I suggested an "adult beginner" class might be more her thing, since those tend to be "process" oriented and less about producing finished products.

Those classes are mostly about freeing (adult) students to actually think and see as artists. These are adults that think that they CANNOT do art, so they are often groups of people who have the most trouble with that inner editor. It also tends to be true in community ed classes or community college ones that you have a very wide spectrum of participants-- so a wide variety of styles, perspectives, etc. More on why that is good at the end of this post.

I'd investigate it with some local agencies and see what you turn up.

Recognize, of course, that part of the charm of children's art is that naïve quality, but that some of the contribution to that very quality is being limited by technical skill. That really can't last, and with greater skill goes that particular quality, too. I treasure my DD's sweet drawings from when she was little. Of course, her style has evolved. It's really fun to watch her style changing as she explores technical skills and different media. She goes through phases that we LOVE, but for her, this is a journey, not so much a destination. As long as she is finding it rewarding to express herself through art, and as long as she is exploring new ways of doing things, experimenting with different perspectives and tools, then she is doing what she is supposed to do. I have come to regard her artistic style as a fleeting and evolving thing, much as I may sometimes LOVE what she is doing at a particular time.

I don't often wish that I could freeze my child in time and hold her in place... but ohhh, there are times when I look back with fondness.

It's more important to me, ultimately, that art be HER expression-- and not further attempts to fit in with peers. KWIM? I think that is often the real issue for us as parents. We see our children (often girls) slowly stop unique or idiosynchratic (but authentic) expression of self in favor of conformity. "Girls should like to draw hearts and unicorns and make little word-art of their cutesy nicknames." There is a particular STYLE that is prized... :sigh: That is definitely a stifling of the artist within, and it's not a good thing. Another reason why an art class filled with ten-year-old girls is NOT a healthy environment for a child who needs to work on shutting up the inner editor, and listening to the inner artist... because the other kids are also pressuring one another to produce particular styles and subjects, as often as not.

A very good book is "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". My mom gave me a copy when I was young and I really appreciated how it taught me new and novel ways to consider art and drawing. It left a very big impression on me and really assisted in my art skills.

You may also want to tell your daughter that some of the best artists of "childish" looking art are actually masterful illustrators (Picasso, Mondrian, Calder) so if she puts the effort into developing her art skills (which it sounds like she's interested in doing) she actually may be able to return to those innocent roots eventually and feel that spark of discovery again. Sounds counter intuitive, but has been demonstrated in art history, and I've experienced it myself. Almost like the more you know, the more freedom you will have to do what looks simple.

Sometimes the art my young children create looks so perfect in its simplicity. Your daughter may never draw exactly like that again, but if she gets the right instruction she will probably appreciate the world that will open up to her.