Kids and Art
I LOVE kid's art. I love their freedom, their effort and their lack of pretense. I love that they work so hard to translate what they know of the world with this non verbal language and if you watch little kids draw it's all about learning a language.
It's a language of symbols and lines, stories and continuity. And a lot of it is just good sense. Kids are very concrete, especially the young ones and their drawings are, too. Every line stands for something. The older they get the more frustrated they get with the discordance between what they know and how they think that's appearing on paper and that's the time I love their work the most, that time of not knowing, of working it out, of sharing their struggle.
This was a very casual assignment with 7 and 8 year olds. I asked them to draw some simple shapes. We are studying animals and plants that live in the ocean so we worked with those.
The shapes were drawn in colored pencil and I invited the kids to overlap figures and stretch them off the paper so we had lots of juicy shapes to fill in with color.
I love to watch kids paint because I love to see their minds in action. I can see their thought process unwind as they make decisions. I can see where their attention is and I can see where their frustrations are and I can see when the frustration wins and the fun ends. I can also see when the absorption is total and the end result is not at all important, when process has become the zen moment and the kid is totally lost to it and in love with the whole experience.
These finished pieces tell the stories of their little makers in a beautiful and honest way. Some surprised themselves, some were disappointed by a lack of control and some absolutely loved their results. For me the stories happened in the doing and the watching, not in the ways the paintings looked in the end. You may think you know which are which by looking at the pictures but I think you might be surprised.
Any thoughts?
More paintings and a lesson plan over here.
