Art as a Conversation: 3 Writing Insights from my 7-Year Old
Today I want to talk about a lesson I recently learned from my kid about how to think about creation and art in the broad sense.
Like many people I’m sure, I feel like my kid is always teaching me things, and this was one of those instances.
So here’s what happened.
My friend Heather and I have started an annual tradition of attending a traveling art festival called The Other Art Fair when it comes to Dallas. It features original works of art by up and coming artists, and so it’s a great way to find original work at great prices while supporting working artists. It’s also just fun to walk around and look at contemporary art, even if you don’t buy anything. It’s a very happy, art-loving vibe. I always look forward to it.
This year, when the fair arrived a few weeks ago, we decided to bring our kids with us. Both of them are seven, and so we weren't sure how it would go—at that age, you never know what’s going to be deemed unbearably boring—but we decided to give it a shot.
Well, it turned out that the children were almost too into it. They loved everything, wanted everything. Actually not everything, let’s be real—the uglier the piece, the more desperate they were to own it.
"PLEASE can we get this weird wooden frame draped in leopard print flannel for $268? PLEASE? IT'S MY FAVORITE THING I'VE EVER SEEN!"
I wound up telling Finn the rules were that we needed to make it through the entire room before deciding to buy anything, and that if we both loved something, we could spend my money, but if only he loved something, he had to spend his money. Long story short, about an hour in, he stumbled on a delicate ceramic bird, and the begging commenced. It cost $59—which was very close to the amount in his piggy bank back home. He needed that bird. He loved that bird. He would spend all his money on that bird, and yes, he knew he wouldn’t have any money left.
This is where this story starts to get sticky, because I almost said, "You realize that's as much as a Mario game?" then stopped myself because was I really going to try to talk my kid out of buying art in favor of buying a video game?
Still, we had to finish walking the room. In the end, he’d coveted the bird for about two hours before I finally followed him back to the artist's booth and let him buy it.
It was very sweet. She told him that he was her youngest collector as she wrapped it up for him.
Here’s where I get to the point.
In the car on the way home, he was happy, chatting in the backseat about how it was fine that he "had zero dollars" now because he had the bird for his "collection." Then he said, "I can’t wait to paint it when we get home.”
Um, what?
"Oh! You're going to paint it?" I said.
"Don't you think it would be more beautiful?"
I said sure, because it was his bird. And, later that afternoon, the bird got a refresh.
Here it is:
A few days later, with the freshly painted bird safely tucked away in his "treasure chest," which is a wooden box we got from Michael's and decorated with markers, he was practicing piano. He had a recital coming up, and he was working on the song he's going to perform.
He played a few bars I didn't recognize.
I asked him about them.
"I added a section," he said.
Right. I told him that he might want to run it by his piano teacher Brent first, but there wasn’t going to be an opportunity to before recital because we didn’t have a lesson before then.
"That's fine," Finn said. "Brent will like it."
This moment brought to mind one of my favorite episodes of my favorite TV shows, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where the gang is putting on a musical and Dee announces mid-performance that she’s going to sing a song she’s decided to add...then does. (It’s truly a classic if you want to laugh your face off for 30 minutes.)
I told Finn he could add the section to his piece.
Reclaim Your Creative Confidence
I realize the fact that I’m ultimately supportive of both of these decisions on my kid's part makes me a meme of a millennial parent. Is it that I don’t want to be the kind of parent who enforces rules for the sake of rules? I don’t actually care if he wants to deface someone else’s art to make it his own; that’s half of what all of art history is. Banksy did it to his own work!
But I think it goes beyond that. He's displaying an artistic confidence that I would love to have a smidge of (or a bucketload). He's not going to possess this kind of childlike confidence in his creations forever. But for now, he does, and it’s beautiful.
It’s the opposite of having to run an idea by someone before integrating it into your work. The opposite of writing by committee, of affirmation seeking. It’s a pure trust in the vision, an unadulterated view of one’s taste in art without the burdens of social norms and expectations. I spend a lot of time trying to help writers trust their visions over other peoples’, and this behavior from my kid is kind of the platonic ideal of that.
So sure, he can add a riff to his piano recital song, and he can scribble all over his first purchase of original art, because clearly he sees art as a conversation, and isn't that the best possible way to see it? How do I get some of that back?
Finally—and I think this is really the most powerful idea that I’m taking from these recent experiences with Finn—don’t feel like you have to run everything by somebody.
We get so used to checking with someone before we make a creative decision, especially if we’ve taken workshop-model classes where things wind up being written by committee. But you’re allowed to just make a call. It’s your work. This can be SO HARD to do. But the fact that I find it really moving to see my kid doing this tells me it’s something I probably could do more of, myself.
I hope this was helpful, and I’ll see you in the next episode, where I’m going to introduce a NEW TYPOLOGY FOR NOVELISTS!
