I am starting a new series called ‘BEYOND Imagination’. My wife and I always crack up when we hear that phrase because obviously if someone is telling us a story it had to be imagined, thus NOTHING can be beyond it.
When Imagination Becomes Bad
When kids are young, in elementary school, they are allowed to let their imaginations soar. If they want to draw a unicorn, nobody is going to stop them. If they want to make a robot that also poops cookies, that’s a cute and funny thing. But when they get to adolescence they are directed by schools, parents, the world, and themselves to make things real. The suddenly want to make that drawing of a car look JUST like a car. If they don’t they get ridiculed by their peers and perhaps others as ‘drawing like a child’. Nothing is more humiliating than that for a teenager trying to be grown up. So they try really hard to copy reality.
And of course most of them fail. They fail because their desire in themselves and the pressure from others is not matched with training on how to draw realistically. Many then get frustrated, feel like a failure and quit.
When Imagination Becomes Good
Those who don’t quit in frustration will eventually learn techniques and methods and get so they can draw accurately. But then what? Many of the best artists then realize that accuracy isn’t enough. So what if it looks like a photograph? It may woo a crowd but it doesn’t really express much about themselves as artists or fulfill their desire to communicate.
Thinking, Feeling, Seeing
Then they start to get back to their child-like imagination. Then they start to create art based on the quote above. Or maybe it’s not about what they think but instead it’s about what they feel. Either way, they become free from the tyranny of realistic accuracy and move towards using color, form, shape, texture, line, etc. (the formal elements of art) to express what is inside them. And we get to see inside them, not just outside. That to me is a fulfilling starting point for great art.
Drawing and commentary © 2015 Marty Coleman | Napkindad.com
Quote by Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, 1881-1973, Spanish Artist
Periscope
You can watch the Periscope video of the creation of this drawing and the guessing of the quote here.
If you are on Periscope you can find me @thenapkindad