Inspiration for Children’s Art Work?
Philip Glass composed this music for Sesame Street in 1979. It is not sampled from his other works. It has aired on Sesame Street as recently as 1994 and probably later. It consists of the movement of six circles (each with a different color of the rainbow) that are formed by and split up into various geometric patterns.
This piece is probably both inspirational and educational for children. As one YouTube comment mentions; “television producers often assume children are stupid, but not so… what children are is impressionable. If we feed them beautiful things, they will turn around and create beautiful things of their own”.
This makes me think about where inspiration is derived from.
Even a Beginner’s Mind needs to start from somewhere…
Artist Marvin Bartel defines four sources of inspiration for creating art:
1. Ordinary Experience. Most of children’s spontaneous drawing falls into this category.
2. Natural and Constructed Environment. Observational work.
3. Inner feelings and Imagination. Expressive and Imaginative work.
4. Quest for Order. Careful and deliberate designs, patterns, etc. Order is generally found in all art work, whether it is figurative, narrative, or totally abstract in nature. Even chaos when it has been produced intentionally, might be interpreted as a form of order.
The subject matter for art work comes from Observation, Memory, and Imagination.
This I would agree with for older children, but for younger children - they may just be experimenting with ‘colour’ to experience the feel, the texture and the joy of simply putting it on the paper.
Next time you observe your child’s art work, maybe this will help you understand a bit more about where it is coming from and just how valuable that ‘scribble’ is for their developing communication, imagination and expression.
