Why Children's Drawings Matter
When Bobby Kennedy took up his job at the Department of Justice in 1962, one of the first things he did was to redecorate his grand office with his children's drawings. It was a very strange thing to do. For most of human history, it's been unthinkable that an important person would pin a picture by a six-year-old to the walls of their throne room. Art was meant to show command of technical skills and a sensitive fidelity to the real appearance of things. But now, children's drawings are everywhere, on our fridges and the walls of our office cubicles. What is it about children and their bold, vivid and utterly wonky drawings that we now see special merit in? It's not in fact strange that it's this period of human history that's been the first to get really interested in children's art. Societies get sensitive to things that they're missing. We live in a world that demands enormous self-discipline and maturity. We're surrounded by precision technology and massive stifling bureaucracies. To survive with any degree of success in these conditions, we have to be exceptionally controlled and cautious creatures. We have to give up so much of what we knew in childhood just to get by. So what we find in children's drawings are bits of our previous personalities in exile. Tender, playful, imaginative bits that we've had to surrender to survive. What's great about children's art is how inaccurate it tends to be. A traditional assumption of drawing is that if you're going to be good at it, you have to look very carefully at what things actually look like. But small children don't give a damn. They don't try to look objectively at a tree or hands or legs. The child is gleefully unconcerned as to the true facts of the world. And to the self-conscious, careful adult, that can feel very liberating indeed. Children's art provides an opportunity to remind ourselves of our true needs. We need discipline and rationality, no doubt. But we also need play, naivety and creativity where we don't need to give a damn. Children's art shouldn't be just thought endearing. It's a map of how we should sometimes remember to be.