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

DD is naturally artistic, with a real flair and "eye." She is not necessarily the MOST technically gifted, but is pretty good there as well (and has not had any training). She has not been drawing very much over the past year, and when she does it's often been the stuff her friends are into, usually "fashion girl" type of stuff; kind of derivative. She's had phases like this before, so I didn't think much of it. However, this morning she pulled me aside and explained with heartbreaking clarity that she can no longer draw "like a kid"--that is, with the freedom that come from not caring whether your pictures look realistic and accurate. She pointed to an old favorite drawing of hers that we have up on the wall (from when she was 5 or 6) and said "I can't draw like that anymore." And it's true--she can't, or doesn't. It's not so much that she is feeling perfectionist as that she recognizes that her work lacks the wild verve that you see in a young child's work and is now more workmanlike and less free. I am sure you know what I mean--there is a shift you see in kids' art when it starts trying to look more "adult" and stops having that gorgeous innocent child quality.

She was really sad about it. I suggested several things--that she try working on more abstract pieces, that she spend more time looking at art that has all kinds of different looks and/or that is not "realistic" so that she sees the many possibilities for art, that she try drawing lefthanded or with her eyes closed, or that she draw random shapes and then turn them into things. I think a good art teacher could also help, but art isn't a strength at her current school. I am NOT artistic myself.

Thoughts or help? This is a genuine gift of hers. It's sad to see her backing away.

I think you're on the right track with the idea of exposure to how 'real' adult artists work.

Sure, there is technical competence at work, but you're also right that losing that way of "seeing" also loses a vital artist's skill.

Art class. Preferably one that aims at people who don't think that they ARE artistic, because those are the ones that focus on individual 'seeing' and very definitely does NOT focus on typical subject material that appeals to kids.

Check with a community art center, local community college, library, or parks department. Good luck!

I like your ideas for your daughter - I think studying abstract art is an excellent place to start.

What about suggesting that she try communicating an idea, rather than duplicating an image in her head? For example, she could draw "confusion" or "bliss" or something like that. Then the task becomes about representing the emotion, and this might help to free her.

Or... you could suggest she try illustration - specifically for kids' books, again as a way to loosen her up a bit. Have her look through some artfully illustrated kids' books, and point out how the story's spirit and emotion is conveyed in a childlike and whimsical fashion (rather than being aged and sophisticated the way that adult illustrations are).

This is interesting to me... there's a parallel here with my daughter's piano. She started at 7, and was a natural composer. At her first piano recital, after having been in lessons for only 3 months, she played a 3-part original composition, two handed, in D-minor. She also played her own two handed arrangement of Ode to Joy. Between lessons she'd sit at the piano and noodle away, creating piece after piece.

She's now 9, and not only has her playing progress stalled, but sadly she no longer creates her own music. It's as if as she's gotten older she's become more self-critical and aware. I almost wonder if lessons have hurt the composer in her by applying "rules" to the music. I think we're going to take a break from lessons (her teacher is leaving the country for a year - we may just refrain from finding a replacement). Maybe this way she can rediscover the joy of following her own ear? Here's hoping

Sometimes I think that stagnation can be a normal glitch in their development... but on the other hand, do you ever wonder if they've lost their magic for good? It can be tough to know what the right thing to do is.

I do know that with writing (my parallel) sometimes when you're blocked, you just have to keep writing. Write, write, write. Write through the junk until you get back to the good stuff. Kind of like getting the car out of the muddy ditch and back onto the smooth road. Maybe our daughters just have to do that... persevere through the glitches...

She is actually about to start two weeks of summer art camp. She's excited, so we'll see. I find that art things for kids often are frenetic in their desire to introduce as many "cool" techniques and glitzy materials as possible, with little emphasis on any other aspects of art. DD has expressed frustration with this. I'd like to put her in something better but just haven't found the time or the right person. It's harder to locate someone for a child who has this gift (versus a child with a gift for music or athletics).

CCN, my daughter also is drawn to musical composition. We don't have a piano, but whenever she is someplace with one she sits with it and makes up tunes. She wants to take piano, but when we discuss it, she says she wants to learn how to write music, not really how to play piano. I don't know what to think about this and have gone back and forth on lessons for this reason. She doesn't actually seem to be musically gifted, per se. (She also makes up songs, despite having a pretty mediocre singing voice. She writes, too. Basically, if it is creative, she does it.) It may just be another outlet for her intense creative drive. I hope your daughter takes it up again. FWIW, my older brother went through something like what you describe and continues a second muscial career as a composer/musician even now in addition to his "day job." he quit piano lessons in his teens after having gotten the technical basis he needed.

DH is an art professor so I ran this one by him. His first reaction was "Unfortunately you can't teach someone to lIke their own art." He suggests trying to combine art with another interest of hers. I.e. if she is interested in plants have her draw or paint plants. Another idea is to play games with her where you both make art and she sees just how bad you are. Or even have her teach you. If there is a community art center near you there might be a class available for kids in her age group where she can be with others facing the same challenges with their artwork.

For years DH had told me the hardest part if his job is getting his students to "relearn" what was instinctive to them as children. Years of well meaning adults teaching them rules like color inside the lines or making things look "acceptable". So your DD is certainly not alone. He says this is why most people don't call themselves artists as adults.

My daughter is a fine arts major and took art classes all through high school. Her freshman year, the teacher had them go buy a large bound book of blank pages. They were required to draw, paint, sketch, or collage something in it every day. My daughter finished her first book and filled another before the end of her senior year. It is such a fascinating journey to watch her art shift and change with her maturity and through the different phases of emotions she experienced throughout the four years. Some of them were whimsical, others dark and angry and a more than a bit uncomfortable to view. But that journal helped with a lot more than artistic skill and expression. It was an excellent outlet. She still keeps an art journal.

Perhaps this is a gift you could give her and encourage her to art-journal once a day. Helping her embrace the transitions and changes may help her accept that her artwork five years from now will be vastly different from now just as it is different today than it was when she was little.

It almost sounds like she needs an art mentor, rather than someone to teach her different mediums and techniques. When I was a child, that was my mom (she's an artist too). I also used to draw, but I never went through what you're daughter is going through because my style was realism, so as I got older I became more and more comfortable (I was lucky ).

It's a tough call with piano lessons for your daughter... I don't regret putting my daughter in lessons, but I wish it hadn't been so "black and white" for her: creativity Vs. technical learning. This was not her teacher's fault at all - she was very flexible and fun (we love her!) but my daughter is just black and white by nature.

On the one hand, composing is very creative, and if you have an ear, you don't need the technical knowledge to help you create. On the other hand, the ability to transcribe what you've written onto paper is very useful, as is the structural & technical exposure you'd get from studying other compositions.

I took a novel writing course (I'm back to writing, but there are so many parallels, lol), and one of the things we were taught was to not edit as we create (activity in your internal "editor" can stifle creativity, because they're two different cognitive functions that don't work together). So the goal would be to create first, just go with the flow, then edit later.

(I wonder if this is what's happening with your daughter's drawing - as she's maturing, the "editor" in her brain is developing and conflicting with the "artist")?

All three (visual art, writing, and music) seem to have that same conflict between the artist and the editor. The trick is being able to tell the difference and be able to switch back and forth when you need to, which can be tough for adults, let alone kids.

The bottom line, I think, is to maintain the joy. It's good that she's excited about the art camp - it could provide the fun and inspiration that she needs

I LOVE that idea (lol I want to do it myself!)

I didn't read all of the replies, but did anyone suggest getting her to try a new medium -- one that is unusually difficult to controle, like cake icings, encaustics, or found art. Loosing controle forces you to work around and come up with creative solutions. My other suggestion is to work inside extremely tight constraints. I like to do historical reproductions from periods too far back for the preservation to be good. So you have to try 16 different things before you get a result that ends up actually looking like the models, and you can rarely use a single model alone (but that's just me). Constraints force you to be creative because when most elements are fixed, you have to use those leftover elements pretty intensely!

No useful suggestions - I just understand what you mean. The problem you brought up is one of the reasons that I have not had DD take any art classes or art camps or formal art instructions. Technique is important but I think it can get in the way of innate talent if imposed at too early an age. I would continue to innundate your DD with all kinds of art through museum visits and free creations in all kinds of medium. I think this is something that she may be able to work out if her interest continues.

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.

I have a degree in art and my ds12 leans heavily towards the arts...so I guess I'm a parent of at least one artist.

I mainly wanted to say that your daughter's observation about the specific quality that her work used to have is really telling that she does in fact have some basic understanding of the beauty and truth that can be expressed in art. Cool stuff.

Perfectionism, shyness around her friends, getting older, all these are factors that could be contributing to feeling constrained when making art. I don't know if advanced instruction would be the way to go.
One thing I thought when I read your post, it might help if she has her own space to really make art in private, stuff she can hang in a small room that most folks never go in. Sounds odd, maybe, but seems to me that could be pretty freeing.

Best of luck!

Update on this: the art camp she did this summer was interesting to observe. This was a group of kids who were very self-selected, obviously--who wanted to do a two-week art camp. They were strong technically. DD was one of the weakest ones technically, although also I think one of the youngest (I have a hard time telling age, though). She produced some "enh" stuff, some fine stuff, and then a couple of things that were rather astounding--not, again, due to technical skill but due to originality of vision. The teacher seemed to be quite good, but there was again the emphasis on cool materials and constant glitzy "neat" projects. Very jumpy--new thing every day.

I wish I could say I'd seen her doing more art since, but not so. I really hope this doesn't fade away. I do think she is just so focused on what other girls her age are doing. Like you said, HowlerKarma--unicorns and name art. ergh.

I just wanted to reiterate the idea of a private place to make art... production of visual art is kind of the opposite of the 'performing' arts...some folks love people to see what they're doing while they're doing it, they dance, sing, etc....some folks are much MUCH more likely to clam up creatively when someone comments even just one time on their work during a class, while working at the kitchen table, on the school bus. But providing a private space can be impractical, I know.
That would perhaps apply if she's making art but it's not the sort of thing she's really envisioning...

If she's stopping altogether, inspiration to create can come from seeing a cool movie, going to a great museum, checking out new music, dance, etc. But she might just want to go in another direction, another medium might be the thing, as others have mentioned.

She has a new school art teacher this year, as it turns out. Though she loved last year's, maybe this one will be inspiring in some new way. She seems very, very young, though.

I just...I remember how she used to draw and draw every day. It was what she did. I used to have to recycle stacks and stacks of art. Now, almost nothing.

She does have her own desk in her room, stocked with supplies, but she rarely wants to be in there alone because she's an extrovert.

I've been an artist since I was a kid, and I was like your dd with my obsessive art making followed by long droughts. I've been spoiled that I could always "render" extremely well - and maybe that's made me lazy. But despite long breaks in art-making, art has never left me.

Now I realize that I enjoy a creative challenge to keep my passion, sometimes it's tradional visual arts like pastel-work, but often it's less conventional like jewelry design, creative writing, cake decorating, or cooking. I'm fickle I guess. While preparing for a watercolor show, all I could think about was learning the art of portrait photography. And manual photography led me to advanced photoshop which led me to digital painting (and who knows what next?).

Often art and creativity brews in our minds for a long time before it manifests itself concretely. If your dd is happy and using her creativity in other ways, I wouldn't push. If she hes sn artist's heart, she'll home back.

...sorry for typos, Kindle won't let correct. I meant to say : if she has an artist's heart, she'll come back home once and again.

You know--she desperately wants her own camera (we plan to get her one for her upcoming birthday). Maybe she'll take it in that direction for a while. She loves to take pictures of things around the house and yard and likes to try to do stop motion movies.

Photography used to be so inaccessible due to the expense of the dark room. Digital photography is so easy to access. What might be nice for your dd (since she's developed s strong internal art critic) is that photography requires no rendering...there is less of a chasm between beginner and advanced. It is a great way for any artist to understand composition and other basic principles of design. And it's fun! (As you can see, I adore photography)