To celebrate International Youth Day in August, let’s look to our kids for inspiration.
To create the lives we want, we need to be bold explorers and feel free. How can we do this? Kids might be our greatest teachers. They know how to enter the creative flow with ease to express themselves as they are, without limitations.
If we give crayons to young children, they dive right in. They don’t ask questions. They have no need to study the work of other artists. They might glance at what a friend is doing then they they start scribbling. It’s the process that interests them—the actual experience of exploring. They have no thoughts of possible failure and take great delight in what emerges on the page.
Soon enough they see that they can draw the world around them too and they do this without hesitation. They’re seldom bothered by issues of skill. When they can’t do something, they simply make do or watch how it’s done and take a stab at it.
Children seldom judge their drawings. They focus on the story they want to tell. They often express their pleasure in the world and sometimes feelings of puzzlement or even sadness. Scary monsters might appear, as do hearts and rainbows, cats and dogs, birds, trees, mum and dad, brothers and sisters. They use drawing to make sense of the world around them and to celebrate it.
At a certain point, all of this shifts,usually around the age of ten or so when so much more emphasis in school is on verbal skills. At this point, kids want to draw with more accuracy but most of us are not given adequate instruction so we give up. Visual expression is often forgotten in the rush to learn other skills and, along with it, we sometimes lose our connection to true creative exploration and expression.
When my kids were small, they drew with great enthusiasm. My son drew with superb accuracy, even from a very young age. I still remember a crocodile he drew aged four that filled a huge piece of paper and was full of strutting character. My daughter’s drawings were seldom accurate, often abstract but full of wild abandon. One might say she had less skill at the same age. But the truth is she was simply expressing herself in her own way. What’s so interesting to me is that they each took great pleasure in the process and had equal happiness in the results. They didn’t judge.
We are all creative beings at heart and we need to express ourselves. It will serve us to learn to be like the kids we once were—intrepid explorers full of appreciation for our endeavors. If we focus on the outcome of our creative efforts, we go nowhere new and limit ourselves. If we judge ourselves or others, we inhibit ourselves. We need to explore with a childish sense of joy, freedom and appreciation. We can even pick up some crayons to learn how to be free again. It’s easy, fun and effective.
Cat Bennett is an artist who has exhibited in Boston, New York, Montreal and Tokyo. She has been a professional illustrator for over twenty-five years with clients such as The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Time Magazine, Harcourt Brace, Houghton Mifflin and many others. She began her career at The National Film Board of Canada and later made short animations for CBC-Sesame Street, Nickelodeon-TV and various non-profit organizations. She teaches drawing as a way to meet the true creative self within. She lives just outside Boston. The Confident Creative: Drawing to Free the Hand and Mind by Cat Bennett, £8.99, Findhorn Press 
