STORY and The Inner Lives of Children: a further exploration of the theme of revisiting the treasures of childhood

STORY and The inner lives of children: a further exploration of the theme of revisiting the treasures of childhood

Here I examine how reading Daniel Pink’s thoughts about “Story” led me to exploring the work of Robert Coles, Harvard psychiatry professor. Researching his work as first encountered and seen on SOF – “Speaking of Faith” extended interviews. http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/ (Psychiatrist Robert Coles has spent his career exploring the inner lives of children. He says children are witnesses to the fullness of our humanity; they are keenly attuned to the darkness as well as the light of life; and they can teach us about living honestly, searchingly and courageously if we let them.)

I then watched the Video of his lecture at Harvard U. (Also - Noted his work with the Duke U. Center for Documentary Studies and Alex Harris’ books and magazines, such as, Double Take, written and edited in collaboration). “The Spiritual, Moral, and Inner Life of Children” is a wise and thoughtful interview with author, interviewer, Krista Tippett. It’s about retaining and not forgetting one’s childhood, capturing your own particularity and spontaneity. How to keep the unquenchable sense of curiosity about the world, of what it means to be human. The “Whys” that we hope our children continue to ask, that we need to continue to ask on our own. STORY is at the heart of it all. How do this and children’s budding political insights and a sense of fairness and justice inform a sense of Global Mindedness, of the Internationalism emphasized in the IB curriculum.

The urgent human need to hope in the face of fatefulness…the importance of STORY. How children represent God in drawings that explore the beyond. Arguing the profound, when their resolution to their arguments is that, ”…well God is God”. ART often clarifies their thoughts, in Picturing-the-Stories they have learned or invented, they comprehend at a deeper level. “How do you see God? Draw it out”.

Which questions do you continue to ask throughout a lifetime? Remember that. You too can connect to the freewheeling search for MEANING that is humanity’s eternal quest (Victor Frankel – Man’s Search for Meaning)

• Children’s witness and wisdom on view in their letters and drawings.
• Repossessing Virtue, transgression, forgiveness, and redemption big concepts to grasp, yet children explore such questions naturally, intuitively
• Living searchingly and gracefully even in the face of hardship
• They are witnesses to the fullness of our humanity, for they see us as we are.
• They ask “Why?” an important part of all of our lives, (the unexamined life is not worth living)
• Their insights are likely often ignored
• Whence your identity? What have you been given, what have you learned?
• The questions are often worth perpetually asking, since the answers are not fixed.
• Where comes justice? Where comes a sense of morality?
• Should we foster a rebelliousness that questions, does not settle, but continues to unsettle. Question any conventional beliefs. This seems healthy, yet too often the repressive attitude is that “children should be seen and not heard.”
• A merger of the natural curiosity about the world with speculation and storytelling. The stories that enrich a lifetime. Story naturally engages. draws us in, storytelling is quintessential to humanity's search for meaning, for mattering.
• Fundamental questions are daring, soulful, seeking, a spiritual quest. Are these not the essence of all the great epic stories?
• We are all hoping the answers will come, will reveal themselves somehow.
• Mystery is such an important part of it, Mystery with power and magic therein contained.
• Rejoice in the mystery, the alluring unknown, as a vital aspect of our lives.
• The emergence of our being is formed by our setting, our parents, teachers, and our society--by the stories we are told, or happen to overhear.
• Connecting with the mystery is profound.
• Are children born with proclivities to delve, probe, to poke around, to know? One must be curious to grow. This is just part of their being, they come to us thus.
• If this curiosity is celebrated and encouraged by the adult world, it can lead to a relationship with The Something More, with the Beyond Ourselves, with God, Goddess, All-That-Is.
• Children are all searching for answers about what we are doing here.
• Frailty and Loss, suffering, vulnerability, grasping for answers in the face of suffering, religion is there to help us ponder, to reflect and pursue seeking redemption. Consider religious experience that arises naturally, just listen closely to a group of young children, you will often be amazed by the profundity of their thought.
• As narrators we tell stories, at the heart of all traditions. It is a connection that children know how to listen to stories. A world full of unfolding stories, an echoing presence stories that will touch you to the bone. Struggling with our downsides and our upsides, our lesser self and our more actualized self. We find all these in stories.
• The truths that can come through a larger calling of stories, larger than life figures that call to us and work their way under our skin, the heroes and heroines.
• Curious and alive imaginations, ready to probe, these we should wish for our children.
• Stories that are lyrical and poetical, symbolical, metaphorical.
• They will speak it out if we do not inhibit them. Listen to them. Listen to their stories.
• Often seen, the Qualities of childhood that mark later lives of leadership.
• Of all denominations, certain convergences, Spirit and the Mystery, our need for ritual, for celebrating, for reflecting and pondering. They know, they know. Prayer as an aspect of our urgent need to HOPE.
• Listen to their exploratory theology.
• Encourage their STORY-making.

Coles is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at Harvard Medical School. He's the author of many books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning series: Children of Crisis and The Moral Intelligence of Children, and The Spiritual Intelligence of Children.

The Crucial Importance of Play

Here are Some Thoughts…Reflecting on PLAY as an essential quality for our civilization's future as suggested by Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind and my attendance at the annual conference of TASP – The Association for the Study of Play, http://www.tasplay.org/about.html at Georgia State University, in March 10-13, 2010

Play can grow talents and intelligences

Play and character development

Spirited Play and playful spirit

The essential nature of play in developing empathy, purpose, an indispensable part of being human

Play as a means of glimpsing the best in humanity and the divine

Research seminal thinkers that D. Pink introduces such as The National Institute for Play, Dr. Stuart Brown, Director

As an intelligent social animal, play is intelligible to all humans. We naturally “get it.” It transcends all cultures.

Spontaneously play is done for its own sake and produces pleasure and joy. There is choice if the individual is safe and not in want, play naturally unfolds.

PLAY is “Guilt-free purposelessness”

The science of play seen in studies of play in behavioral studies of animals and humans

By all measures we can observe the universality of play

TASP – The Association for the Study of Play as a source of the most prescient contemporary researchers in the field of play and human development

Play is not trivial, for instance follow the trail from the very beginnings of life in the interactions of parent and child, the joyful experiences for both child and parent that now can be witnessed through the medium of medical imagery.

Animals and humans who are deprived of play are rigid and lack adaptability. They do not seek out novelty, they are trapped in the past, the previously experienced.

Our capacity to play has been evolutionarily necessary. It has been invaluable in our evolution as a species.

The practice for life that play enables…it is the borderland between our inside and the outside world. It is the interface between a playful view of the world and the realities of a world full of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Consider Competition and Contact in play such as: A natural emergence of testing one’s skills in competition.

Mark Beckoff, author and keynote speaker at TASP writes eloquently of play behavior in animals, particularly wolves.

An amazing Atlanta resource is the researcher, Olga Jarrett, PhD, Professor of Early Childhood Education at Georgia State University.

Play awakens something in the adult, which is relearning the languages that we forgot or vaguely remember from our childhood. And we see in the writings of Daniel Pink that this is pretty crucial stuff for our future success.

Play and the discovery of our natural talents: the role that this stage of trial-and-error experimentation, a willingness to chance. It represents a resonance of openness to life. Consider Play across the lifespan. Play’s importance cannot be underestimated…it is in synch with these times.

Risk-taking in play is exploring the edges of the dangerous, with some but not excessive risk. It is absolutely necessary, to allow the spontaneity in taking the actual risks. Play teaches the young what they can and cannot do. Without play, we can deprive youth of valuable lessons. It is reasonable to have challenging playgrounds, to deal with the tensions of exploring limits. We too often err on the side of caution: keeping their bodies safe but endangering their souls.

If those talents are given free reign, then empowerment and freedom, imaginative self-discovery may take place. This is nature’s way of saying “this is who you are and what you are.” Look back at what gave you joy as a child. (see my earlier posts on Revisiting Childhood in artists’ lives) Look at the successful lives of people who play. The terrifying but joyful risk-taking…if you can’t play at it, you can’t invest your entire self in it. Play can reinvigorate and renew your creativity. Videogames do give opportunities for imaginative thought and practicing certain life skills, as Pink observes.

Brain-imaging techniques demonstrate that areas crucial to learning get lit up by movement, it accelerates learning. Looking at the developing brain as the wealth of information in this field unfolds.

What role does ART play? Is it play as an integral component of the biological design of humans, art facilitates an ability to retain playful behavior throughout a lifetime.

Be resolved to play more--recovering this as a healthy part of our childhood inheritance. Healing the child within: start with rhythm and movement. They fill an empty heart with a sense of stepping outside of the urgency of time. Being in the moment.

Be about kindling and “following your bliss,” as Joseph Campbell suggested. Reach into visual and emotional images that becomes an internal show. Play is imbedded into you since you had childhood experiences with play. Consider DANCE--move it, shake it, and watch the smile grow. Watch the interview of Dr. Stewart Brown on the PBS “Speaking of Faith” blog.

Although these thoughts are not in the form of a cohesive essay, I believe they represent my pondering play and some of the fields I have been exploring since reading Daniel Pink and his writing about play as an essential sense to develop for success in the future.

Architects-in-Schools Program

A research trip over to the Dogwood Festival that was taking place the same day as the a.r.t.s.APS course, at Piedmont Park across the street from Grady HS, was very inspiring. There I found good information on “green construction technologies” that will be helpful for next school year’s Architects-in-Schools program that I will be piloting at E. Rivers Elementary. This will be a joint venture between the Atlanta chapter of the American Institute of Architects, Georgia Tech, and Southern Polytechnic College. Advanced level architecture students, interning architects, and volunteer practicing architects will deliver the program. We will use a curriculum developed by the Architectural Foundation of Oregon. I will be posting more information about this program and the inspiration for bringing it to Georgia soon. Sharing green construction techniques with students will add a broader dimension to their work with designing a built environment.

Reflective Writing April 16, 2010

http://eriversvisualarts.blogspot.com

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000236 EndHTML:0000005774 StartFragment:0000002436 EndFragment:0000005738 SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/phillipalexander-cox/Documents/a.r.t.s.APS%20Course%20Work/Reflective%20Writing%20April%2016.doc

Reflective Writing April 16, 2010

The experience of teaching my cohort peers a new printmaking technique was quite fulfilling during this work session at Grady High, particularly since everyone soon made use of the technique in our collaborative art project. Our image-making session followed a presentation by a visiting APAL artist. The subject matter for our joint artwork was to be influenced by Daniel Pink’s book, “A Whole New Mind”. The technique I shared was a solvent-transfer of Xeroxed or laser-printed images. I had just learned it the same week in my printmaking class at the Chastain Art Center. It involves a relatively safe solvent paint stripper to soften the toner on black-and-white or color copies made on a standard copier or laser printer. The key is to have an image printed with a plastic-based toner or color ink—not an ink-jet printed image, nor one from a magazine that is printed on coated paper. The Citrustrip Gel product is available for about $12 per quart, and should be enough for hundreds of transfer prints. I would recommend using it with gloves, taking care to not get it on exposed skin. Although the solvent is much safer than others used for this process such as MEK or Wintergreen oil, adequate ventilation still should be provided. Applied liberally to the back of the intended image, black-and-white and color images transfer well if the toner is well heat-set by the copier that produced them. Note that you need to wait several minutes for the solvent to penetrate the paper when the stripper is applied to the back of the image. I recommend lightly taping the image down so it does not shift when it is placed over the paper to which it is to be transferred. Be sure to remove the excess gel stripper that hasn’t penetrated the paper by scraping with scraps of matboard. The same gel can be reused many times to transfer images. After the gel is removed and the back of the image is covered with wax paper, you can start burnishing the image down. Moderate pressure with a burnishing object such as a wooden spoon or a smooth glass bottle is all that is needed to get a good black image; however, color Xeroxes require more pressure. This is a good time to pull out that rarely used printing press to run your paper and the original through with enough pressure to get a good color image transfer. I believe you will find the technique useful for work with students 5^th grade and up. Good Luck.

Revisiting Childhood Part Three

Revisiting Childhood --Part Three

-Mind of Science, Eye of God (2000)

As I have been exploring the works of contemporary artists who have mined the riches of their childhood memories to discover the influences these remembrances have upon their current creations I must mention the encaustic paintings of Chicago Artist Dan Addington. His “Heroes & Villains I and II” in oil paint, tar, and encaustic wax on panel is also collaged with comic book pages. The artist explains his powerfully graphic, moving, sensual, and tactile paintings thus:

“They are scenes from a mythology of heroes peculiar to Mid-Twentieth Century American boyhood, learned monthly, an issue at a time. Stories to be studied, page-by-page. Scenes to be played out in backyards and on garage rooftops. Volumes of rare apocrypha offer up old secrets and hidden truths. Illuminated manuscripts of venerated pulp texts lie scattered about the floor and bed. Inspired narratives of action, adventure and justice swell up and swirl about while sacred hymns of gunfighter ballads pour from the speakers of a tiny Sears & Roebuck turntable. When, as a child, I first found and read the old illustrated pulp westerns and adventure books that my dad had bought and read when he was young, it was the first time I truly understood that he was once so much like me – that through time and memory we shared the same mythology. The thin cord between our generations was pulled tight.”

In Dan Addington’s paintings, figures are dark, mysterious, bold and heroic in gesture, as well they might be, considering the subject matter and emotional resonance they must have had for the artist as a child. He is clearly exploring some deep psychological territory that makes use of abundant symbols of heroism and struggles for power that our culture has to offer. In addition, they suggest a meditative exploration of twilight moods mingled with something else. The large angelic figures in other works are equally metaphysical, and mysterious. Addington has acquired a style and media that work well together with his subject matter of memory and dream.

This mix of media and collaged materials got me thinking about the possibilities of alternative ways of painting, inspiring me to do a bit of experimenting myself.

Lets see if I can manage to post some of Dan Addington’s inspiring images…otherwise...Looking into his website one finds clues to the meanings of some powerful paintings:

http://danaddington.com/art/index.html

Revisiting Childhood Part Two

C. Dawn Davis
Portrait of a Young Saltimbanque
oil on panel
36 x 26 inches

C. Dawn Davis

Garden of Grace

oil on panel

16 x 16 inches

Zoe Starr & the Princess Pups
oil on canvas
28 x 28 inches

C. Dawn Davis

Harlequin Baby

oil on panel

14 x 11 inches

Further Revisits to Childhood

“ To be an artist is to never fully relinquish childhood.” – Pablo Picasso

Following-up on my previous blog about the experience of childhood artmaking and how it informs artists’ present art, I want to mention three other artists whose remembrances of childhood have influenced their work. Their creative output can be seen in on-line galleries, and in some cases at Atlanta-Area gallery spaces.

The painter, C. Dawn Davis who currently has work at the Matre Gallery in Atlanta, (http://www.matregallery.com/davis/paintings/) frequently represents child-like figures in her oil paintings. These personages appear in unusual costumes and theatrical settings. Ms. Davis has written of the persistence of childhood memory as it reappears in her work:

“If you are someone who can read another language well enough, then you know the feeling of understanding in head and heart of what is being said, but find it impossible to give another the exact translation. You are thinking in the other language. So it is with my paintings. The same elements reappear – figures posed in costumes and masks accompanied by birds or monkeys in spaces undefined except by color and geometry. I do realize…that these ideas are grounded in remembered reality. As a child, I saw an organ grinder and his monkey and have been haunted for years by the sadness of his wizened little face and the way he looked at me when I gave him my dime. I don’t always know what I’m trying to say when I start a painting and many times the outcome is just as mysterious to me as it may be to the viewer. Our childhood memories follow us wherever we go. They collect themselves and are presented again and again whether or not we are fluent in their language.”

Perusing Ms. Davis’ website evidences a continued interest in images that well up from the past: http://www.cdawndavis.com/. Here, then, are a few examples of her work:

Let me introduce two other artists whose work is similarly evocative and worth viewing as a stimulus to examining one’s own memories of childhood. Possibly such recollections will initiate an analysis of how such memories can infuse one’s artistic life. I recommend a little research into their work for anyone who wishes to plumb the depths of a seemingly inexhaustible spring of creative inspiration…memories of childhood.

Working often in oil on a large scale, Mark Dylan Hyde paints images that are surreal in their dreamlike juxtaposition of unusual combinations of objects. “Relics of a Rainy Afternoon,” (2001) is a visual visit to a remembered attic of antiquated bits and pieces, the sticky memories that remain attached to an adult artist. Mr. Hyde wrote quite eloquently of childhood memory as it informs and influences his art:

“We can never revisit childhood, not in the sense of a returning to or a recreation of one’s past. We can return to childhood only in memory, and our ability to remember childhood, although a wonderful gift, is also an elusive one. We watch our children and try to remember our own lives. Our most precious possessions are those things, like photographs and portraits, which facilitate lucid memory. We know there can be no turning back the clocks. Inherent in memory is a strong sense of nostalgia, a longing for that which has been lost, for that which is irretrievable. To remember the past is to gaze through a window blurred with leftover rain or obscured by sunlight. We are left with fragments of sensation, with half-glimpses and veiled intimations. These paintings are meditations on memory. They attempt to capture the intangible half-glimpses of memory and hold them still. It is small and commonplace, the quiet and empty, illuminated for an instance, imbued with mystery by an ebbing afternoon light, that triggers memory. I work with the residues of memory; with long-forgotten photographs, keepsakes that weren’t kept, tattered pages from a diary that went unwritten, the relics of memory. The memories of childhood are temporal; tidal pools of stranded impressions, water held in a cupped hand. They can become a haunting presence in the painter or poet. The ghost of one’s childhood dwells within the soul of the artist. We could not relinquish it even if we wanted to. It is always there. It is an anachronistic appendage that was never fully shed, and whether consciously, or unconsciously, it suffuses in us an inviolate sense of wonder, essential to all creativity. But we cannot go to it. It must come to us. The memories of childhood are whispers, the voices of ghosts. It is the whispering of these ghosts of childhood that evokes memory and informs these paintings.”

Hyde’s website is worth a view to see examples of the art he alludes to in his statement:

http://www.markdylanhyde.com/ T h e G r e e n C r o w S t u d i o

Art-making in Childhood As a Form of Human Connection.

I witness students in my elementary art classes who are new to the school and who are often new to this country, arriving with little language proficiency, but who use their artwork to demonstrate to their peers that they have capabilities and talent, value and intelligence. The generous spirit of the other students who recognize a new student’s efforts and reach out to their new classmate moves me. Just this week, an immigrant child from China won the admiration of her peers by rapidly and proficiently completing a drawing of a lion, our school mascot. Everyone was making a portrait of a lion for the Art Tile Fundraiser for our new Fieldhouse. As this particular student entered and demonstrated her skills, she made new connections to her classmates, possibly building new friendships through the use of a visual language. This is a quality of art production that has strong and lasting social implications for a person in a strange new environment. Here is a story of just such an individual who, now as an adult is reminded of such an experience.

Childhood Revisited.

In the Fall of 2002, I saw an art show at the Aliya Gallery which was a nine-artist group exhibition titled “Childhood Revisited.” The curator described the premise of the show as:

“Childhood is something that we all share, for better or worse. The experiences of childhood can define who we will be as adults. I have invited this group of nine artists to reconsider their early formative experiences and create works of art that reflect their memories of this time. This exhibition promises to be a rare glimpse into the minds of visual artists.”

I found much of the work engaging and I was particularly enlightened by the text that accompanied the artwork, which the individual artists wrote to explain their creations. The written passages added an extra dimension to the work, describing the memories that motivated the imagery, whether distinct and graphic memories, or of an overall mood of the artist’s childhood.

The work of one artist I found especially emotion and thought provoking, that of the Vietnamese born Duy Huynh (pronounced yee wun). In his painting “Chalkboard Child,” he painted himself as a child on a chalkboard green canvas with many repetitions of scrawled chalk-like lettering, “I will not draw in class, I will not draw in class.” There we witnessed a situation depicted where Duy’s incessant drawing may have been a refugee boy’s way of coping with the strange newness of an adopted land and it’s educational institutions. As the artist wrote:

“I received my first art commission in the third grade – an eight and a half by eleven inch pencil drawing of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I was paid two dollars and chocolate milk for a week. It was around this time that I started drawing, and consequently began building friendships with some classmates who would normally not acknowledge me before. For a nine-year-old refugee from Vietnam who spoke very little English, this was monumental. I soon realized that I could use art as a means of dealing with the overwhelming sense of displacement experienced throughout my childhood.”

You may view this painting by clicking on the thumbnail image found on the artist's website amongst images on his fifth gallery page titled, "Origamic Dream" http://www.duyhuynh.com/

Another one of this artist’s work was equally wrenching and powerfully graphic, depicting an environment of destruction and loss. The painting is of two individuals climbing into a tree as floodwaters rise – “The Flood.” Duy Huynh’s paintings have been described as poetic and contemplative, which symbolically reflect geographical and cultural displacement. I would refer you to his recent work at the Matre Gallery, on Bennett Street in Atlanta, GA: http://www.matregallery.com/huynh/, and to his own website: http://www.duyhuynh.com/ to see examples of his paintings. I am including several images below…and here you can see some persistent themes of motion and emotion in figures that portray the triumph of the human spirit as journeys are undertaken and destinations are reached.

Art experiences help to heal a lonely or fearful child.

The artwork was one way I also found my place in an elementary school community when I moved to a new township in Ohio as an eight-year-old child. I was shy and uncertain and unsure of how to make friends. However, I drew constantly and soon had my classmates asking me to make funny drawings of people. My caricatures often included word=play as well, such as “Jimmy Vanetti all covered with spaghetti.” A decade ago, I rediscovered many of these drawings when I cleared out my parents’ house after their deaths and the sale of the family home. I can relate to the profound and lasting experiences of making art as a child that were so seminal to Duy Huynh's development as an artist. The act of communicating through one’s art can help an unsettled child find a sense of belonging, a human connection in a new environment…a source of solace. I believe childhood memories can be a rich source of imagery, worth revisiting for any artist.

Here are links to some of Duy Huynh's paintings:

http://www.matregallery.com/huynh/single-gallery/4261822 "Crane Wife"

http://www.matregallery.com/huynh/single-gallery/1424124 "Embarkment"

http://www.matregallery.com/huynh/single-gallery/3849705 "All Is Transient"