I was making collages yesterday with two kids in the ten year old range. One of the kids was my niece, the other was the daughter of my good friend. There was no hoopla, no ego parade, which is the benefit of art-making with ten year olds I suppose, we each just painted and pasted and arranged with no goal but to sit there in the doing of it. The TV was on, the sky was gray and cold air seeped in through the window behind us. At one point my friend's other kid, college age, surveyed the chaos of papers and torn up pages of magazines and tiny pots of paint from the doorway. She's a math and science major. She said, "This just does not look like fun."
We're all built for different things, sure. It's stating the obvious to say that artists need to make art. I hope the ten year olds don't know this yet, that at some point it becomes way too easy to justify not making art - by worrying about money or other people and how to keep them happy and/or safe or keeping the house clean. Because this makes us more legitimate and useful to society, right? Justifies our right to be here? Uh, yes, if you're looking at it purely logically. So how to explain that while what we're doing, me and these two kids, doesn't look like a big deal, really it is. What we're doing, making small, small motions - a little glitter here, a little color there, spilling paint and glitter all over everything - connects to something so much bigger, something simultaneously mundane and transcendent. I told an artist friend later, it seems like if there are any answers (to our bad ass dilemmas as they occur in real time) they're somewhere in there, in this wordless place that gets accessed while the hands stay busy doing what they love to do. Adding a little glitter here, a little color there.
For a little while on a gray day, three kids - one of them grown (me) and two of them yet to be - remembering who we are, who we really want to be.
