Cervantes Magazine Number 24: Plastic Arts
Without a doubt, a common memory of childhood shared by most people around the world, is to be in an early school classroom, painting with colors and leaves, drawings of flowers, cars or trees. That childhood moment where the teacher said: "paint it the color you like". It is one of the stages where art is lived more than any other and perhaps without even knowing what art is.
Is art present during our childhood?
Childhood is considered one of the most important stages the human being experiences, or the most primordial. You begin to explore all those unknown things of which you don’t have consciousness and explore them one by one or several at a time, incorporating in the process an infinity of new things. But here's the question: are plastic arts essential to childhood?
What we must keep in mind is that, during childhood, children have the wonderful gift of doing things that adults often don’t understand. "Mischiefs" like scratching the walls of a room with colored pencils or something simpler, like a blank sheet (there’s no difference for them); those are actions that many times an adult doesn’t understand. Is it art or just a disobedient child? Of course, disobedience is always a major point when it comes to the little ones.
In the innocence of his childhood a child lives in his day to day events, whether related to the family or the outside world, and although as adults we already have the ability to deal with our problems, children do not. Therefore, the child will look for a way to express what he feels, perhaps without intention and doing it spontaneously, as the previous example of drawing things on a blank page or on the wall (we don’t need to be psychologists to know that a child expresses himself in what he does). The truth is that, as humans, at any moment of life we need a space of expression, a place or moment to exteriorize what we feel, and in childhood those moments begin, that is precisely where the role of the Plastic Arts enters that stage of the human being.
Through what many consider simple, like a drawing or a painting, thousands of feelings and thoughts can be expressed. The influence of Art in childhood lies in being a tool to capture what we feel (although we don’t what it means at that stage) and it is worth a lot.
Plastic Arts are important in childhood, because thanks to them, children have a free way to show what they want to without ties or impositions. And of course, this helps to make childhood progress without frustrations and in a more enjoyable way, as well as it allows a creative atmosphere most of the time. On the other hand, what has become clear to me in the artistic world is that Art makes us more sensitive and at the same time more astute, since it exhorts the human being to debate without resorting to violence, another reason for art to be present.
Childhood and Creativity go hand in hand
Without a doubt it is one of the most beautiful stages a human being lives. Speaking in a less formal way and being innocent during childhood, gives way to imagination and creativity to seek meaning in everything we see. And look for an explanation. From the written language, drawings of trees, flowers and cars, the plastic arts are present in each of those moments of our childhood. Growing creativity that helps us to be artists of life, learning shapes, colors and even textures everyday. Of course, perhaps with or without knowing it, when we do things as simple as learning the different colors of fruits and drawing them. There lies Art in childhood.
In conclusion we can say that childhood is where we play the role of scientists and philosophers of life, looking for the why of things, and while parents also play an important role in that stage, as children we have a private space of artistic expression . Undoubtedly, art is something that should be encouraged from an early age to the adult stage in order to form sensitive, clever, and investigative human beings.
As always, i’d like to conclude with a phrase, this time from a great teacher:
Every child is an artist. The problem lies in how to remain an artist once he grows up.
(Pablo Picasso)
Jesús Oropeza, Student of Education for the Arts, major in Plastic Arts.
Article based on the subject: Didactics for the Arts I
Original by: @chopiliart
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