Once in awhile I have a little paint party with my 4 and 5 year old granddaughters. I am always distracted from my own paint project by watching them. Their imaginations and enthusiasm just run free without all the constraints we put on ourselves as adults. The results are fun, and I love them, but I also really enjoy watching the evolution of the painting as they go. For example, the zoo piece in the foreground has a chameleon under which all of the other animals are sheltered. What a fun idea! Our adult minds think, well, that is just impossible for the much larger animals to squeeze themselves in under a low slung chameleon, and what would a chameleon be doing in the zoo anyway? But in the mind of a child with a paintbrush anything is possible! Who said art has to be constrained to the “real” world anyway? Children make such great art because they have not yet thought of it as a right or wrong.
So, from the delightful art of children, I learn to add a little whimsy into my own works…and let them become a bit of childlike play and silliness. Requires me to hush my inner critic, who is perhaps just the very adultish version of myself.
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” Joseph Chilton Pearce
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