Every Child is An Artist

Picasso once said "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."

Picasso understood that seeing is feeling.

A child's drawings look strange to us, because a child draws what they feel. Human perception - like all organic perception - is designed not to show us the world as it is, but instead to present those things that matter - those things that we react to. So children draw huge smiling faces, reflecting their affective experience of the world. When they draw, you see how a child feels - how they, literally, see the world.

We have to learn not to see the world. That is to say, as adults we are taught not to reflect on paper what we see (i.e. what we feel) but the patterns of light and shade as if captured by an unfeeling thing - such as a camera film. It should strike us as odd how terribly difficult this is to do - to set sentiment aside and make an inhuman representation of things. We do this in a great many ways, in order to hide from ourselves what we are.

Only later do great artists rediscover the ability to represent what they feel. The power of Van Gogh's starry night is that he is drawing what he feels - what he really sees. He is a man who, when he looks to the skies, sees the brilliance of the stars and the majesty of the night sky.