I spent most of this morning helping out at a holiday project for local children based in our local Baptist church. My contribution was not particularly onerous, and didn’t demand any great artistic ability, but it was fun. (I was helping them to paint their own designs on beach bags.) It is a long time since I was last involved in working with children, apart from our own grandchildren, and the opportunity to see a sizeable group of them together really made me think about children and art.
This is a topic of particular interest to me at the moment, because the picture I am working on at the moment, in my series on creation and creativity, centres on a child.
I suppose that the youngest of my “clients” today was no more than two, and the oldest I would guess to have been about thirteen. So it was possible to see the increase in manual control as they get older, but also to look at the way in which they relate to the creative task in hand changes with age. I admit that I am dealing with a very small sample on this occasion, but the experience raises questions even if it doesn’t enable me to answer them.
The event that really set me thinking was the fact that the oldest child to take part copied a beautiful design she had downloaded on her mother’s mobile. Her ability to draw precisely was impressive, and her control of the paint was good. Although the result was very attractive, and she was rightly proud of it, I did wonder what the creative element was in the task. I compared it with the work of a lad of (I estimate) seven or eight, who drew a shark from memory and the imagination, which did leave something to be desired as an exercise in zoological observation, but it did convey something of the ferocity of the animal, that he wanted to communicate. I fancied that I saw a general pattern along these lines in the pieces I saw today.
This is a massive (over)generalisation, but I did end up wondering whether the privileged place given to writing and elementary maths in the British educational system these days, and the marginalisation of art, might entail the development of “right-brain” activity at the expense of “left-brain” activity. Manual skill might well be enhanced, but the imagination is left to fend for itself. The kids have a different task tomorrow, but I will be interested to see how they shape up.