Having a Salisbury Moment

We're lucky to have a family friend who is an industrial designer. Very visual and creative guy, and fascinated with new technology and emerging art. When my kids were babies, he used to tell me a cautionary tale about schools and how teachers can get trapped thinking inside the box. For example, the whole thing about "coloring inside the lines" and using traditional colors for objects -- green for grass, blue for sky, yellow for sun -- like that.

He encouraged his own daughter to color, but never using coloring books with predetermined pictures and "use this color on this part" instructions. No emphasis on "staying inside the lines" but rather, busting out of them and making your own creations. He encouraged her to color, draw and make art using blank paper as a starting point. And he urged us to consider doing the same.

Well, here we are 5 years later and my daughter is a very creative artist. Gets a lot of evident pleasure from abstract paintings. She is a nontraditional thinker and clearly has her own ideas about how to create art, which we applaud and celebrate. Imagine my reaction yesterday, when she told me her classmates said her drawings "were bad, because they don't look like what we're drawing." My wonderfully artistic daughter looked hurt and discouraged, and said, "I can't draw."

I pulled myself up to full height and declared, "YOU ARE A GREAT ARTIST. The greatest artists in the world draw what THEY see and what THEY feel. They don't just draw what is in front of them. Your classmates are being silly. YOU ARE A GREAT ARTIST. We will visit the SFMOMA and I will show you what I mean."

She never ever makes art that looks like anyone else's. For example, her 'self portrait' was almost exclusively 3D with beads, buttons, yarn, feathers and other little plastic shapes on paper. Everyone else just drew a circle with eyes and nose using crayon. She painted, used glue and mixed media, in a fully non-representational color palette.

Our industrial designer friend is very proud of her, and told her to keep it up.

We'll be visiting the SFMOMA next week. She'll be able to see for herself that Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock and Pablo Picasso all missed the memo about drawing things the way they look to the masses. And thank god they did.