Kids' Drawings Reveal Their Reality
What is art? It’s what a child draws on the sand or a piece of paper. Sometimes it’s frightening, daddy beating mummy or touching his baby sister in a wrong way.
Art is also abstract, a jamboree of colors on canvass as the artist vents her frustration at her rich parents that gave her the ‘right’ accent, a comfortable life on the hill and a trust fund.
Art is in the eyes of the paint brush owner, the images the soldier saw before he lost his legs in Afghanistan. It’s an image his father before him saw in the eyes of a Vietnamese boy, before he threw the grenade to kill what his commanding officer called, communism.
Nature is a popular subject for painters. Sometimes a painting of a stream is so vivid, you imagine the sound it makes as it goes over rocks. However, I draw the line on roses in a vase. I will not ooh! and aah! over paintings by Victorian debutantes with time on their hands while they waited for ‘the coming out season’ so they could bag a husband related to the Prince of Wales.
I also have an aversion to cut flowers. Mama said flowers should be left alone on the ground, because they die once they are cut. I found it strange then and dismissed it as ignorance. What did she know about flowers and romance? After all, she was not university educated like me, her daughter. At the time, it didn’t cross my mind that she worked as a maid and sold knitted handwork for my school fees.
So, what kind of art do I like? Art that jogs my memory about things I have seen, I hope for, liked or did not like based on my understanding of what is and what ought to be.
By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.
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