It’s an age thing, I’ve noticed. I’ve taught a lot of art classes; not in schools, but as one-day events, two hour activities at fairs or seminars, and six-week-long community classes. The ages of my students range from 4 to eighty-seven, with particular concentrations around the very young and very old. From my experiences I’ve compiled a sociological cross-section of people getting weird about art. Allow me to combine and paraphrase the trends:
Age 4-7
Do you like to draw?
“YES! I love to draw!”
What do you like to draw?
“All the stuff. I draw my sister and our house and Santa Claus and fish and dinosaurs.”
Will you draw an elephant?
“YEAH! Her name is Pickles and she has pretty earrings and is driving a TANK!”
(makes elephant green and magenta; adds rainbow, birds, dinosaur bones, and grandma holding a plate of cookies)
Age 8-9
Do you like to draw?
“Yeah! Drawing is fun. I want to be an artist.”
What do you like to draw?
“I draw lots of cows and rainbows and snowmobiles.
Will you draw an elephant?
“Okay. I’m pretty good at elephants. My elephant is balancing on a ball at the circus!”
(Includes a veritable narrative in the people attending the circus; people eating popcorn, reading programs, petting a caged lion, swinging from trapezes, etc.)
Age 10-12
Do you like to draw?
“Uh huh.”
What do you like to draw?
“I can draw a dog. And I know how to do trees too.”
Will you draw an elephant?
“I think so. Like this, right?”
(draws generic side view of solid gray elephant)
Age 13-16
Do you like to draw?
“I’m not very good.”
What do you like to draw?
“I dunno. Stuff. I’m not very good.”
Will you draw an elephant?
“I don’t know how to draw that. Will you show me?”
(draws nothing)
Age 17-55
Do you like to draw?
“No. All I can do is a stick figure.” (laughs)
What do you like to draw?
“I don’t draw. I guess I doodle sometimes. They’re just doodles.”
Will you draw an elephant?
“Oh no. I wouldn’t know where to start. It would look terrible.”
(draws nothing)
Age 55-87
Do you like to draw?
“Oh yes. It’s great fun.”
What do you like to draw?
“Flowers, landscapes, my cat. Recently I started sketching birds.”
Will you draw an elephant?
“Sure. Let’s see how good my memory is.”
(draws generic side view of solid gray elephant)
As you can see, people get weird about art. What’s great about old people and young people is that neither of them give a shit what you think, and they do exactly what makes them happy.
Also around year eight the social brainwashing starts to sink in. All those people telling you that clouds are white and shaped like a bunch of C’s squished together. That robots were not present at the battle of Troy. That dogs don’t have antlers; that’s The Man trying to get you down. Of course I’m using the phrase The Man as shorthand for the manner in which our culture is priming children for reality, not for art. Allow me to explain through hypotheticals.
You, being a Sensitive Parent, asks your child (let’s say her name is Penelope and she is six years old) to tell you about her latest drawing. Penelope explains it is a school bus with children on their way to school. You notice several problematic issues with this scenario: the school bus is green, the children are on top of the bus, there is no driver, the bus appears to have webbed feet.
Being a Sensitive Parent, you don’t mention this last one, feeling it’s more an issue of skill, but make casual note to Penelope about the other clear errors.
I would never tell my hypothetical daughter that her drawings are wrong! you protest, I am a Sensitive Parent! Art is a free spirit, or something!
Ah, so you wouldn’t say, “A green school bus?” while grinning crazily and bugging out your eyes to imply that such a thing is beyond the scope of reality?
Or, “What are the kids doing on top of the bus?” or even, “Where is the bus driver?”
These may seem like innocent questions meant to inspire thought in your child, but really they’re corrections. You’re gently drawing Penelope’s attention to her mistakes. Your responses could be identical if you swapped the drawing with math problems.
“Two plus two is five?” Sensitive Parent grinned at their silly daughter and bugged out their eyes in mock amazement.
Or “What is the decimal place doing here? Where is the remainder?”
The problem here is not Sensitive Parent’s response, it’s that Sensitive Parent is treating their child’s fictional creation as though it was identical to reality. Ironically, it isn’t even actual reality, it’s Sensitive Parent’s perceived version of reality. Clouds are not white; they are white, pink, green, purple, red, yellow, gray, black, violet and thousands of other colors that vary so slightly they don’t have names. Any artist could tell you this, and any child young enough could, too. But once they’ve been told again and again that clouds are white, suddenly they can’t see the vermilions and golds even when they do look.
The kicker is that some people do notice that snow is electric blue, but if you ask them “What color is snow?” they just trot out the “right” answer like the robot they’ve been programmed to be.
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| How much white do you see in this picture? |
Ask a more probing question and you’ll discover they have noticed the discrepancy, but have opted to pretend that what they see doesn’t exist.
While I’m using phrases like “social brainwashing”, which rightly have sinister connotations, I don’t mean to imply that this cultural conditioning around children and art is evil. It’s just a thing that exists, like the gender binary and athlete’s foot. I merely wish to call people’s attention to it. And while we’re on the subject of children and art:
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