Drawing Classes & Art Programs 2007 - 2008
Exploring Creativity
By Constance Del Nero
TRY TO CONJURE UP images of childhood. Do you think of kids riding bikes, engaging in sports, playing house, building with blocks or drawing pictures? If you’re a parent, chances are you grew up differently than children today. You probably watched less T.V., you may not have had a computer (and if you did, you almost certainly didn’t play video games on it) and you likely spent more time playing outdoors. If you had pencils or other art supplies, you may have spent lots of time absorbed in creative endeavors.
Creative endeavors are a normal part of human development. The desire to communicate or express ideas by making images is part of the human condition. Thirty thousand years ago, our ancestors painted pictures of animals on cave walls. Twenty thousand years later, they started carving figures into rock surfaces. They also came up with a series of symbolic images that could be drawn or carved in sequence in order to tell a story. From there it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to such splendors as Grecian urns, Buddhist temples, Raphael altarpieces, Hokusai woodcuts or Frida Kahlo self-portraits.
Cultures around the world have, often independently of one another, come up with a wide variety of drawing, painting and carving implements, techniques for using them and occasions for creating images with them. Children who don’t have access to sophisticated materials will draw pictures in the dirt with sticks or fashion mud pies with their hands. In older people, the creative urge may be fulfilled by making baskets, weaving fabric, crafting jewelry and decorating the human body. The universality of the urge to create suggests that this is an important and basic need, ranking not far below eating, sleeping, and shelter.
ActonArt fosters creativity by providing children with guidance and top-quality materials in a safe environment. We strive to provide enough direction so that kids gain the technical skill necessary to express themselves, while at the same time allowing them leeway to develop their own pictures. Our students are challenged to come up with new ideas and to solve their own predicaments, but there’s always a safety net below them. Our non-verbalized questions to kids include, “What’s your vision?” “How might you express this?” “How do you come up with new ideas?”
Creativity is very, very personal. Every child expresses creativity in her/his own way. Sometimes it’s easy to see the gears turning in the child’s creative brain. It’s not unusual to hear kids say, “I have an idea” and proceed to trot out a vision for completing their artwork. Some younger children like to offer stories about what’s going on in their pictures. All children work at their individual pace as each creative quest is unique. Sometimes students will produce visually stunning artwork, but sometimes, lessons learned on the creative quest might not be so obvious. Change and growth may be internal and may not be evidenced in every piece of art. Trust that change and growth will occur and honor the child as s/he develops.
