Simple Minds

This article describes John Kelleher's experience in observing the creations of his preschool daughter. Both he and his wife are formally trained in the arts, and looked forward to guiding their daughter down an artistic path. In his mind, what makes a great artist usually involves a great deal of technical ability and commitment to a complex idea. While these are not the qualities of a toddler, the author was continually amazed by what his daughter was able to convey with the simplest strokes of a crayon. He observed that when students of art were formally trained, they were really giving up a bit of creativity for a type of visual clarity. The author's daughter had no interest in that visual clarity. She worked only in conceptual clarity. She had no concrete intent and no concrete audience. She was not burdened with technique or the physical ability to control her marks; instead, she concentrated on the subject and how to translate her vision onto paper. In thinking about how his daughter drew, he was reminded of a lesson he had given many times to college freshmen, many of whom had never taken an art class before, concerning visual efficiency and the way an artist can choose how to reveal his or her subject matter. This is often a balance between abstraction, narrative, and technical facility. His daughter brought this difference between ways of seeing and representing the world to life for him. She drew the way that she did because she did not have a grasp of our visual culture.