From what I’ve seen and experienced in life, every child is some form of an artist. Dance, song, play, and exploration are all the normal parts of childhood. We are our own first choreographers, musicians, playwrights, master finger painters and cinematographers. With unrestrained marvel that is continually being played out with endless energy, children have not yet lost that ability to play, to wonder and dream. Reasoning has not yet discouraged possibility and disappointments have not yet shattered their passionate aspirations.
Commonly quoted, Picasso’s ‘every child is an artist, the problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up,’ is a question that seems to resonate within most creatives. The creative instinct is often the first thing unlearned on the road to adolescence. John Lennon echoed the refrain, “every child is an artist until he’s told he’s not an artist.”
How quickly we instruct the creative child that how they are creating is incorrect. In a great TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson states that kids “are not frightened of being wrong. Not to say that being wrong is the same as being creative, but if you’re not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong and we run our companies this way; we stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running our national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make... Academic ability has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at in school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can’t afford to go on that way.”
The creative is tapped from a place that remains untouched; where imagination is not held back by cynicism, reason, competition and ambition, where curiosity embraces a genuine and fearless interest in the unknown mystery and possibility; where excitement is stirred up through collaborative outlets, discussions and causes. Awe is our reverence for the amazing, unhindered by expectation, amazed, unbiased and often willing to approach that which is later reduced to spiritual whims, coincidence and myth. Early innocence creates the purest form of wonder!
As if to answer Picasso’s famous quote, author, Hermann Hesse addresses the question in his fairytale (Iris): "All children feel this, although not all with the same intensity and delicacy, and with many the feeling is gone as though it had never existed even before they have learned to read their first letters. Others retain the mystery of childhood for a long time and a vestige and echo of it stay with them into the days of white hair and weariness. All children, as long as they remain within the mystery, are uninterruptedly occupied in their souls with the single important thing, with themselves and their paradoxical relationship to the outside world. Seekers and wise men return to this preoccupation in their mature years; most people, however, forget and abandon, early and for good, this inner world of the truly important, and all their lives long wander about in many-coloured mazes of wishes, worries and goals, none of which has a place in their innermost being and none of which leads them back to their innermost being or to home."
