Art in the Daily Life of the Child

by Grant Wood
Every child should be given the opportunity to express himself in drawing and painting. This does not mean that we should try to make professional artists out of our children. It simply means that whether your child is going to be a farmer, a mechanic, or a corner butcher, he will be a happier, richer personality and a better citizen if he learns to express himself freely with pencil and brush.
To understand why this is, it is necessary to put aside a few of the traditional misconceptions about art. Let’s get rid of the idea that the art activity is reserved for divinely gifted people and that esthetic perception is the exclusive property of a cultivated leisure class. Above all, let’s dispense with the notion that art consists solely of a number of strange objects shut up in museums, galleries, and the mansions of the wealthy. Let us begin as the distinguished American philosopher, John Dewey, has begun, by considering art as a quality discernible in everyday experience.
Now, while art—the unifying and clarifying quality—enters into our everyday lives, it is by no means as pronounced as would be desirable. It is the misfortune of many of us to live unvividly. Our senses give us a dull, secondhand, fragmentary account of what is going on. There is not enough unity and clarity in our experiences; there is not, in other words, enough art.
The average child, on the other hand, lives a great deal more vividly than the average adult. He is more sensitive, more alive to his environment. When people experience things vividly and fully, as children do, it is natural for them to express themselves, to celebrate their everyday experiences through some medium. Give a child crayons and paper and he will not ask questions. He will make drawings.
This does not mean that he is “queer” on the one hand or a budding genius on the other. It simply means that he is a normal live creature, fully interacting with his environment and celebrating his experiences in such a manner as he can.
Expression, contrary to the popular notion, is not a mere overflowing of emotion, such as crying and screaming. It is a controlled activity involving the selection and organization of materials of past experience and their fusion with present situations to create new forms. The development of expressive power increases sensitivity, sharpens the perceptive faculties, makes the creature more alive to the world. And ability to express oneself is in itself important to happiness. A person deeply afflicted by experience but with no way of refining and resolving his emotional impressions into the products of expression is an unhappy and inhibited person.
It becomes apparent, then, how desirable it is to cultivate the natural sensitivity and freedom of expression the child possesses—to cultivate them not as training for a special field but as an enriching of personality extending into all fields.
In earliest childhood, if given access to materials, a child will begin spontaneously to draw and daub to express his reactions to his environment. He is doing this for himself alone; there is little, if any, recognizable imitation of external objects. But this does not mean the drawings are meaningless marks. Ordinarily, the child invents a set of unique personal symbols which represent to him objects and events in the objective world.
For example, when I was a youngster of three, I was constantly drawing little clusters of curved lines, tiny arcs opening in one direction and looking like so many half-moons or fingernail cuttings.
It happens that there was a very matter-of-fact explanation for these drawings, which my mother discovered by patient and tactful inquiry. My favorite creatures on the farm were Plymouth Rock chickens. If you are familiar with their markings—black bars on white—you will understand my childish symbolism. A cluster of half-moons was my private way of representing a Plymouth Rock hen.
Great progress has been made in the handling of very young children in schools in recent years. The chief difficulty now is with parents who don’t appreciate the value of these early efforts and interfere in one way or another. After a few years—I have found it to come usually about the seventh grade—the child becomes socially conscious with regard to his drawing. He wants his drawings to mean something to other people and, realizing that he doesn’t have the technical proficiency to communicate meanings, he is anxious to improve his methods.
I cannot too greatly emphasize the importance of this period—the transition from an individual to a social point of view—in the development of the child’s interest in art. It is the point where instruction in art should begin. And it is the point where public school education most often falls down because the instruction given is of the wrong kind. In most cases, the teaching is so stereotyped and unimaginative that it tends to blight whatever early delight in drawing and painting the pupil once had.
The art teacher in the seventh and eighth grades is supposed to teach his children certain principles of technique. He is concerned with getting these principles across as quickly and easily as possible; so he does this in a didactic, arbitrary way without reference to the individual interests of the children.
This type of teaching is utterly wrong. The business of the art teacher is not to teach technique nor to transmit a body of principles. His job is to help the child develop his art capacities. Teaching of technical processes is involved, of course, but the thing of first importance is to keep the child’s interest alive. The child should develop along the lines of his individual interests and should learn technique as he needs it. As he becomes involved in new experiences, he should expand and improve his technique so as to be able fitly to express them. That is the way all significant art from the humblest to the highest forms is created.
The point is that children today do have very definite interests growing out of modern life—different from those of children a generation ago, but nonetheless genuine. Instruction in art can and should be given in terms of these interests. Obviously, this calls for more flexibility in teaching technique than the stereotyped kind of instruction. It demands a teacher with more technical ability than many art teachers have. It also demands small classes where the teacher can give his pupils plenty of individual attention. But these things are not out of reach. Competent public school instruction in art can and will be provided for our children if the people demand it. The aim of art education in the public schools is not to make more professional artists but to teach people to live happier, fuller lives; to extract more out of their experience, whatever that experience may be. Only the mentally hidebound will contend that in the long view there is anything narrow and impractical in this aim.