The Art of Children

My 5-year-old grandson drew a picture for my birthday. As you can see, it’s a birthday cake, complete with candles. It’s a little lopsided, and the table it is sitting on is a bit odd, but I think that it is the best birthday card I’ve ever received. While of course I am prejudiced because it was done by my brilliant, talented, amazing grandson, it got me thinking about what it is about children’s art that makes it so charming. After all, your grandchild or niece or nephew or godchild or son or daughter is also brilliant, talented, and amazing, too, and the birthday cards they draw for you are also the best ones that you have ever received.

Some part of me wants to say that we delight in the drawings of children—especially our own children—because we love the children, and their drawings somehow connect us to that love. Or, in a more sentimental mode, perhaps the spontaneous, untutored nature of children’s drawings reminds us of our own childhood, or the childhood that we wish we had had. Or, maybe we wish we could still draw that way ourselves, without worrying about whether we were doing it right, or if the colors go together, or any of the other judgmental things our inner critic says about our own drawings.

I think that all of these things do come into our appreciation, but there is something more. When I look at a painting or drawing by an adult, I think about things like design, craft, and style, on the one hand; and where the work before me fits into the overall conversation that is the history of art, on the other. None of these criteria are applicable to the drawings of a five-year-old. We cannot really compare them to great works of art like a self-portrait by Rembrandt or Picasso’s Guernica or Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross. Nor can we compare them to the anonymous and equally skillfully made tribal masks from certain places in Africa, or the prehistoric drawings of horses and bison deep in the caves of Alta Mira.

It seems to me that what the drawings of little children share with the great works of art of any time or place is a certain kind of truth. This truth is not found in a literal depiction of what can be seen with our physical eyes, but rather in what can be seen with what the Apostle Paul calls in Ephesians 1:18 “the eyes of our heart.” This drawing, like so many other drawings by children, is connected to the outer world – the cake is on a table, it has candles, it is decorated with a bright, red band – but it also seems to reveal the very thoughts and feelings of the person who made it.

The drawing shows not just a birthday cake, but the way the artist gave himself over to the process of drawing it. In the process, the imperatives of the picture took over from the simple reality of a cake on a table. There is no awareness of outside judgment in this drawing. It wasn’t done for a critic or a museum or for history. It exists as a true record of a moment in a person’s inner life, and that truth has value.

Or, maybe I’m just a doting grandmother.

The Need for Art

One afternoon, a young woman sat in my office asking about art classes at the seminary. Trained as a lawyer, she told me that she had been working for a program that provides essential services—health care, legal aid, food, and shelter—to homeless people.  She said that she believed passionately in the work that she was doing, but that she came to realize that the most important part of the program was not filling these practical, immediate needs, but rather the art experiences that were also made available to the clients. Given paint, clay, or other materials, and the time and space to explore what they could do, the people became more than the sum of what they lacked. They remembered who they were at the deepest, most spiritual and honest level, and opened to the truth of their shared humanity. Now, my visitor told me, she wanted to learn to make art herself, to find out how to tell her own truth in visual art.

The need for art is not secondary, to be filled after people are adequately fed and housed, but rather a primary part of what it means to be human. Art is not only, or even primarily, about making one’s surroundings more attractive, or adding ornaments to an already satisfactory life. Art is an important pathway towards knowing oneself, of communicating that knowledge to others, and becoming an integral part of the human community.

Poetry and Healing - a post by Kathleen Henderson Staudt

From now through early June, the Smith Center for Healing and the Arts will be featuring an installation called FLUID:  Rhythms, Transitions and Connections, work by Francie Hester, Lisa Hill and Reecca Kamen.   Of particular interest to me is the blending of poetry with fabric art and Sculpture in Hester and Hill's piece " Words as Legacy – A Leaf of Knowledge.". This work was Inspired by the words left behind by Brendan Ogg, a young poet who passed away from brain cancer at age 20. An integral element of the work includes community knitting by more than a hundred participants and a musical composition by Mattson Ogg.

Brendan Ogg and his family were members of the babysitting co-op in our neighborhood when our children were young.  I remember sitting for Brendan when he was quite small, but I got to know him well during the last year of his life, when we had several deep and important conversations about his passionate interest in and love of poetry,the poetry that he wrote both before, and particularly in the year after, his diagnosis and surgery for a brain cancer that proved fatal. I had the privilege of editing for publication Brendan's chapbook, Summer Become Absurd, which was published by Finishing Line Press in 2010, shortly after Brendan's death.  A gifted poet, he learned much from the experience of illness and limitation and wrote eloquently out of that experience.  Some of the poems in this volume were written during a workshop offered by the Smith Center for Healing and the Arts,  and I will have an opportunity to help perpetuate this gift when I lead a workshop on April 28 at the Smith Center, called "Finding our Voices, Telling our Stories.". More information is available here .

I found my own voice as a poet coming out of an experience of illness and loss:  a cancer diagnosis and the encounter with mortality that this can bring -- and did bring for me (some of my poems from this experience are included in my book Waving Back: Poems of Mothering Life).  20 years later, I found that this experience, and the paradoxical sense of grace that came with it, created a connection between me and Brendan, younger than my own children and living a lifetime in the last year of his life.  We will be exploring themes of poetry and healing later this spring at the Bethesda Writer's Center I will be reading with Margaret Ingraham (one of the guests at our recent  dean's forum on poetry and Scripture ) and friends of Brendan.  Our program will be entitled "Poetry of Loss and Life."

Brendan's story, his poems, and the lively artistic community that has sprung up in our neighborhood in his memory, all testify to the power of the arts to bring healing and deepen community, perhaps most of all in times of deep sadness and unbearable loss.  The events around his work this spring carry for me some deep insights into the mystery of Resurrection, and how we grow into that mystery through our creative work.

More on Brendan's work and story can be found at the website "Words as Legacy".