The Gray Sunday Science Project
Go find some art that you created as a child. If you have to, ask one of your parents to see if they have any of your childhood art laying around. It’ll be fun, I promise.
Here is a painting that I did when I was three years old:
Say what you want about my style, it looks like a little kid painted it, but damn, I think I had a pretty decent sense of color. For a three-year-old, anyway.
Now take the art that you did as a child and try to imagine how you might go about drawing or painting the same image today, applying whatever artistic ability or insight you’ve developed in the intervening years.
Would you approach it in more or less the same way? Or would you find some element of the original that you like - a group of colors or shapes, maybe an idea or impression - and start from there, adding or subtracting as necessary?
Don’t think about it too hard.
Here is my modern day approach to the painting above:
Odd, that. I mean, really, the first one is full of brightness and the exuberance of childhood. The thing above is old and ragged, potentially evil.
The knee-jerk reaction is to figure that maybe the decades have beaten me down, erasing the bright-eyed optimism of youth and replacing it with bleak cynicism. Where I once saw all smiles I now see a sinister grimace.
But I don’t think that’s true. I still feel generally, if warily, optimistic. If not exuberant. Also I’m pretty sure I was actually trying to give the figure above a grin that conveyed sincerity, and it’s only the limitations of my artistic ability that resulted in something that conveyed malevolence instead.
Still like the colors, though.
I’m not really sure what any of this means, except maybe to note the various ways our brains and bodies and methods of personal expression evolve, or don’t evolve, over long periods of time.
Now save these pictures and draw the same thing again a couple decades from now.
