“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” ~ Pablo Picasso

Children are natural artists. They enjoy the free play of creativity. We all know this. Ask a bunch of kids who’s an artist, and every hand in the room shoots up.

As Picasso remarked, the problem is how to remain an artist once the child grows up. What happens between the fun of pure creative freedom and “growing up”?

Howard Ikemoto

“When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college- that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, ‘You mean they forget?’

We do. Forget.
We grow up, and we stop taking chances.
We get busy.
We doubt ourselves.
We forget.
I think about this every week when I open the mail.
Kids send me their drawings; their art is filled with wonder and color and joy.
It’s a gift to see it.
And it reminds me not to forget.”


~ Howard Ikemoto

This line of thought implies that it is not impossible to regain something of the easy relationship to drawing and painting that we all enjoyed as very young children. We are still “natural artists,” that’s the good news. It just takes us years (the rest of our lives?) to “remember,” to decondition ourselves and return, as French poet Arthur Rimbaud said, to our “original state as child of the sun.”

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a
child.” ~ Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, Child with a Dove, oil, 1901. 29 in × 21 in

How that’s done is probably going to be different for everybody. Some artists deliberately bypass academic knowledge, skill, and rational self-judgment by making art that explicitly taps into the world that children know – that is, by making art “about” or reflective of the imaginative realm.

“To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and commonsense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.” ~ Giorgio De Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico, The Child’s Brain, oil, 1911. 31 in × 26 in

Most don’t take such a literal approach as to paint the world of children and dreams, but to paint from that place of mind. Accessing your “inner child” as an artist is about freeing yourself from fear, getting past the warden, tricking the conscious, judgmental mind to look away for a minute so that something strange and wonderful can happen.

When I taught creative writing, we had our students practice free-writing. We told them to put their pens on the paper and keep them moving for 10 minutes – no stops, not even for punctuation. If you try this, you’ll find that eventually you stop writing “I don’t know what to write” over and over because your pen starts  discovering more and more rabbit holes of memory, desire, and all the other waiting avenues of the inner self to explore.

I told my students I knew they had a dreaming artist mind on one shoulder, and a strict, judgmental logical mind on the other. The idea was to “write past the censor”; to write so fast that the artistic pen would outrun the judgmental grammarian. Doing this with painting is just as hard if not harder.

Ideally, you want the childlike, imaginative, unconscious mind to be working hand in hand with the critical-thinking mind. Making that happen takes both long-term dedication to the art and the courage and self-compassion to trust the heart.

Joaquin Sorolla, Children in the Sea, 1909

Once more, Picasso: “It takes a very long time to become young.”

Here’s hoping you and I, dear reader, can one fine day look back at our earlier work and say with Bob Dylan, “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

Art, Music, Ocean Views, Mountains
Debra Huse, “Saturday Serenade,” oil, 8 x 10 in.
 

The Laguna Plein Air Painters Association (LPAPA) had a “just plein awesome” morning of art, music, and ocean views when more than 60 LPAPA members and outdoor painters gathered in Heisler Park with Philharmonic Society musicians for the “Sounds with Plein Air Paint Out.” The event was a community outreach one, in celebration and support of the 21st Annual Laguna Beach Music Festival. It’s always great to see a convergence of the arts – people who attend for the music may find a new interest in visual art and vice versa. Great idea.
Plein Air Live is online later this week – and Coming this May, it’s the Plein Air Convention & Expo brings the foremost artists in their fields to share their best practices and techniques with you for five days of high-impact art instruction. It’s your chance to be part of a family of artists (including Debra Huse, whose work is featured above) and to learn from the very top painters in the world. Join us in Denver, May 21-25, 2023! Click here to learn more now.