I can't remember how I came across this story from a few years back of this art prodigy, there are a lot of those around, but this one was only four so it caught my eye and she'd sold over 300,000 dollars in paintings so it really had me curious. Her name is Marla and her father is an artist so one day he gave her the tools to get started doing canvases and she ended up loving painting. A local art dealer got involved and the dealer sold some things and then a documentary was made about her.* It all fell apart after the documentary because it was revealed during the filming that her parents helped her with her paintings and it was even suggested that they finished them for her, *gasp*. As a parent of a four year old I can assure you that I would not have had to make a documentary to prove this. I can't even get my son to wipe his own butt or finish a plate of fries. They like stuff yes but it lasts five or ten minutes and then they move on to other things. I can only imagine the drama of the greedy dealer "we have sales quotas to meet!" and the parents "honey just do ONE MORE painting and then you can sleep...and have dinner..." Aside from the pimping your kids in the art world part (scary place) I still love the story because it's a cute kid and she does some really fun art. Or at least she used to. I wonder if she doesn't hate it now because of all the tension it caused in the house. And because the swimming pool won't get paid for.
She still paints and videos of her doing some paintings are on her website. These "yes she really does her own paintings" videos are facinating and if I felt like her parents were idiots for what they did to her, I could at least forgive them for how they provided her with the tools for painting and handed her the techniques for making a big artistic statement. These videos really got me excited because they gave me ideas for getting Little S to do something similar with a few friends in an art atelier. It looks like lots of fun and certainly the idea of doing a huge canvas like this maybe on an old sheet, stapled to a wood frame and primed in a dark color is really exciting. I like the tools she uses too and some of the techniques look like lots of fun for kids, palette knives, brooms etc. If only her dad had written a book about how to get kids painting.
This all reminded me of an exchange in the comments with another blogger about our kids and drawing for them. She said she never instructs her daughter even if she asks and I said I enjoyed giving Little S drawing tips but maybe that was wrong of me. Then I came across this short interview with author Susan Striker on the Artful Parent about what to do when your kids ask you to draw for them. I like what she says. Best to say “let’s both draw” and to let loose and scribble. I think it's really hard to avoid showing them the shortcuts as they get older but maybe it is best in the end for them that they learn on their own. I guess I often do it to keep interest sparked. There's a fine line you don't want to cross. I think I walk that line a lot.
(*I really want to see this documentary if anyone can find it lurking somewhere let me know)
link to Marla's story On 60 Minutes
15 comments:
Oh, I wish we could come to your art atelier! I am hopeless at drawing and I never do enough of it with Lily.
Hmm. I wish my daughter would draw with me. When I tell her that I won't draw for her, she usually falls about sulking and crying before she starts throwing her crayons around.
Blah.
Damn. I wanted to italisise my, not daughter. I'm an idiot.
Why do they give her such huge canvases though? I looked at the video and she's crouching all around it. Wouldn't it be more comfortable to have a kid-sized canvas on an easel?
Penny - if you ever get to Paris on a Wednesday the door is open.
jc - have you tried taking her out sketching with you? a fancy sketchbook and a nice pen might get her interested. I'm still not sure how I feel about the whole drawing FOR kids thing. My aunt always did it for me and it did spark the interest at a young age so...
Paulita - probably for the wow factor. the parents said in an interview that she kept "requesting" larger canvases :/ btw did you see in the videos that she paints on the kitchen floor? I just kept thinking about that the whole time I watched the video. acrylic paint does not come off of grout! It was what made it all look staged to me.
I have tried the sketchbooks, and pens. The works.
I guess that my way of thinking is that art is a struggle to actually do seriously and that generally, the ones that you cannot discourage, come hell or high water, no matter how many obstacles you put in their way, are the ones that should be encouraged.
My daughter does draw. Just not with me because neither of us can focus if she does (she's very social and likes to brag and wants to show me everything. I don't want to give her my approval, I just want her to do it).
I'm sure this will change in time, our drawing separately.
She does do a lot of drawing on her own though. Usually after I've put her to bed. I've noticed that when I walk past her room, the light will be turned off and then mysteriously, when I'm safely past, the light will turn back on.
Oh I'm of the drawing is for everyone camp. No rules! I'm pas terrible myself, totally fly by my pants but I think drawing is key in early education and a way to help you see the world throughout your whole life, especially observational drawing. I also think it's meditative and that's what I enjoy for myself. Hoepfully I can force feed that to my kids too (not the art but the love of it).
As far as becoming artists, hmm maybe they'll be influenced by it and like you say if they have a burning desire to create full time then they'll go that direction but I think even so the art gives them perspective for whatever career they enter.
I've been reading a lot about Reggio Emilia education lately and its really changed the way I think about learning and explained a lot about my problems learning growing up. Reggio pushes aesthetics and art.
Rambling. Okay I'll stop now. I forgot what I was even talking about. Oh yes, I think it's great that your daughter draws late at night. But I think in your home art must be everywhere and she has automatically what most kids don't get at all. She's lucky! :)
Rewriting this because of typos:
However, despite the fact that you tell yourself that you're 'pas terrible', you actually prove my point. You are worth encouraging because you refuse to be discouraged. You just keep on plugging.
You keep showing up.
;-)
But you may have a point. Just as children of avid readers tend to be readers, my daughter, with my stuff all over the place, will probably come into it naturally. I love it when she goes to town on the canvases I buy her.
Little ones. Adapted to her size.
Hee.
Well now.... I just finished an "art in he elementary school curriculum" class for my masters, so I feel highly qualified to comment here :-).
I think current pedagogical theory would advocate helping the children out when they become frustrated. It's very bad when they get frustrated because that's when they give up on art, convinced they can't do it. But - technique has to be taught and learned. Things like color mixing, drawing faces, proportion, symmetry, and so much more... it all has to be learned. It's not innate. I'm all for either showing the kids the technique, or yes, even doing parts of the art for them.
Jessica - cool, are you doing an MA in art ed? That sounds really interesting!
I suppose I'm more or less of the camp where you don't butt in when kids create. I'm not even sure why but for me it feels wrong to show them things. When I say I walk the line I mean for example he'll ask me when I draw "what are you doing there mom?", "I'm shading this" I'll say "to make it look rounder" Then he'll want to try on his own and I'll point out where he might try it. He starts scribbling like a madman in one or two spots and sort of tries it out but doesn't really get it. Normal I guess since he's so young.
I know I would never touch any of his drawings though. Not even to give him an idea what to do. It would just feel really wrong to me. Even this little bit of instruction feels wrong. I suppose my thinking is that if he's interested enough he'll figure it out eventually when he's older on his own(sort of what Jennifer said above), whether it be from books or an instructor.
A funny flip side to this is that Picasso did nothing but copy the masters all through his formative years, copy and recopy and his father instructed him in technique all his young years. He didn't turn out so bad from all his instruction so you know maybe it doesn't matter one way or another ;)
I too would like to disagree with Jessica or more accurately, the pedogogical methods that she has learned.
When you "show" a child how to do something, even going so far as to draw out something for a frustrated child, you are implicitly telling that child that there is only one way to do that one thing and that anything else is "wrong". You are the teacher. This is what that child will believe.
No matter what that child does thereafter, his work will never be the same as what his instructor did which may actually incite the child to give up on art because he can't do the same thing exactly. He will see himself as a failure.
Art isn't math where there are set rules and methods of getting an answer. Art is a process. Not a bottom line.
There is no wrong in art. There are no mistakes. You can teach theories, colour, shading, volume, perspective but when you get down to it, these are not necessarily bound up in rights and wrongs, only conventions as they are theories and not unmutable laws.
Interesting discussion going on here....
I hear you about getting a four-year-old to keep doing anything that they don't want to do. I suspect Sophia would keep painting longer than I let her, but probably not once the pressure was on!
That kid paints in some very clean rooms. You'd think they'd have a studio for her by now....
If you do find a link to the documentary, please share. It looks very interesting.
With a young child, approximately under 8 yrs. old - it is a moot point. They are uninhibited in their art work, and it's wonderful. When they reach a particular stage in their artistic development (humans go through distinct and universal phases as they mature), known as "realism," they are going to look at their drawing critically, and measure it with how "realistic" it looks. They are immature and don't *usually* appreciate abstraction in art. I've seen it frequently - this is where they become convinced they aren't good artists and become unwilling to create anything. Just ask a 10 or 11 yr. old to draw you a self-portrait, and see what I mean.
Here's a little explanation of the topic I found very quickly online:
http://www.arts.ufl.edu/art/rt_room/teach/young_in_art/sequence/realism.html
Anyway, I wanted to explain myself, but I'm not asking anyone to agree with my point. By no means do I think a child's art should look a certain way. But I do think teaching technique keeps them invested.
Yes I agree that there is a shift around age 10 and the link that you posted is great. Thanks for sharing. Here's a quote from it:--
"This interest in visual description typically emerges around the age of nine or ten as children begin to adopt their culture's conventions for representing a three-dimensional scene on a two-dimensional surface (Winner, 1982)."---
I think the key phrase there is "culture's conventions" because I think the shift has to do with societal peer pressure. We're taught to make it all look "right" and this is why so many give up on drawing around that age. If you can't make it look right, don't get it perfect like everyone else you tend to give up.
And then he/she goes on to make a very good point...
--"As children's readiness and interest in showing depth in their pictures becomes apparent, having them study the ways in which various adult artists use overlap, diminishing size and linear perspective within their works might be helpful. But, children need to understand that the use of these pictorial devices is only one way of organizing space and that many artists today have abandoned such conventions in favor of developing more personal and expressive ways of seeing and making art."---SUCH a good point. *click* you just turned a huge lightbulb for me by linking that, thank you. Children might be able to learn about perspective but they need to know that conventional drawing is not the only way. There's more than one way to do it! I think they need to have that idea drilled into them as much as possible starting from the time they first pick up a pencil so they're prepared for it when they hit adolescence and think they've got it all wrong. Actually in today's school system the visual arts are completely forgotten by the time they reach that age so maybe it's a moot point, but whoever gives them their paint palette and pens needs to give them that philosophy.
This is a really interesting subject for discussion. I hope you aren't feeling ganged up on Jessica! It's just that you have me thinking (cool, sahm´s don't get to do that very often!, and with you having studied this academically and me and some others always thinking about it, it brings in two really strong viewpoints.
(grrr, this keeps jumbling and i can't get the quotes to look right--hope you can read it okay smushed--third times the charm)
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