Artists, Fathers, Daughters....Sons (edited this AM again)

I love this quote,
"When you pick up a brush don't ever ask anyone for help. Because the most wonderful thing about painting is being left alone with your own imagination. I do not paint to get praise from others, but to play a game of endless joy."
Wang Yani

That would be extraordinarily insightful if you were in mid-life, that a child made the observation might be worth doing a double take.

I just read the book A Young Painter by Zheng Zhensun and Alice Low with my class. This book like many I love so much in teaching... it was ONCE a part of classroom when literature was a focus and doing with kids a mechanism to construct meanings.
When I could chose pieces...when I too could create and think.
Yes in the infamous Whole Language days.
It was then.I'm not apologizing for keeping it in my things....
or in my perspectives.

Once how I built young poets, artists, readers, and thinkers in creative ways was to use stories like this to create situations to motivate to dialog the creative process. ( the one we are looking to find for schools of the future...we lost it a few years back under a big rock labeled accountability that actually was mis-labeled from a far different kind of stone).
When meta-cognition was something you were actually structuring, mediating and including in the teachers on-going unscripted, natural and powerful self-directed conversation to student in real lives, not reading about being invented at a training. While of course being forced to read a one size script and do a follow up page in a thirty buck workbook called something like
"A Perfect Sentence". A Nonsense.
Once.....once...before the test driven mania.

Before the superior ways to teach to test became a frame to inform me what to do with my time, when I had apparently no skills, no uniformity, no ability to relate relevant material with a standardization and proof system just like everyone else exactly...back in the do whatever you want basket weave days........ (that I never really recall as like that)......way back... ...I read this book to get us excited about seeing your world, drawing it, thinking in an arts process.
In days when literature was at the heart of a theme, idea, a structure, a backdrop and maybe EVEN why we read. Certainly not to decode a test...but decoded to learn....to test our limits.
TO ACTUALLY READ to know. one serious thing missing now is motivation, connection to meaning making, creativity, relevance to student and a process that saves lives not only with employable skill sets but a vision to move a life forward. When I had pride.

Now a book like this becomes "something a workbook can excerpt".

You can quote that. I said it. I saw it excerpted in a test prep thing. Wow. It made it to the big time. A test demo...wow. So you know it has value. The book I'm sure is excerpted on many a test somewhere. It's the truth. It's as my students says, "For reals...."

We are going to do murals next week and started thinking today about this book to help get ready for outside painting on paper rolls, a practical and fun part of the project. A place to look for some insights is this book. It's very powerful to look at the story of a child, who was an artist right "out the chute" as my husband likes to say. Yani is her name.
And my guess is she typifies what a parent might want for a child.

PLEASE CHECK OUT THIS very rich Artist Hero's site. PLEASE.

In my career teaching since 1996 I have used this book to teach about .....well...what art can be to my children. It can be a way of thinking things over, an approach to looking, observing, reaching conclusions, and a kind of meaning making model for a young learner. Scientific process...as she shows this is a way to knowing. Here i disagree with Aristotle and site her, Yani, for why. Not third times removed from experience, embedded within it. Of course Michaelangelo was essentially arguing the same thing. It isn't a lesser form of intellectual development. But in western tradition it may well be we have lost insight into this as a way to teach...in some poverty areas I'm in anyway. Above all else.....this young Chinese child Yani found an avenue to expression of her particular culture, forms, meanings, her "self" ...through painting.
And she excelled at the medium making a body of work documenting her journey. It pales to see this outside of her contexts for within her world you see how she is in a meaning filled dialog through the medium.

But let me say a little generally.

Yani was a young Chinese artist who in 1989 came to the US to Washington, DC for an exhibition of her paintings. That's pretty incredible for a 14 year old. By twenty she had painted more than 10,000 paintings according to this neat story of her life in art.
At four one of her paintings sat on a Chinese stamp, how remarkable.
She grew up in Gongcheng, China apparently in an area of extreme rural beauty and in her work one sees the reflection of the world she knows. outrageous landscape, animals, forms.
Lost in lush water running playing I swoon under the power of her images.

Her work is lively, quick, fresh, breezy, whimsical, and full of animals in allegorical constructions. looking at her works has to be one of the nicest trips into story visualized. She owned a monkey given by her father at 4, and throughout her work the monkey is , perhaps , the form of the most fun, whimsy and spirit. Indeed in the text we are told she represents herself with this monkey character. And her brothers as well, so many paintings in the book represent these joyful times of sibling play, teasing, the movement of young ones, the life force of the babies....Of course the most thrilling thing is she appears to have achieved so very young a kind of place where the medium of expression is no barrier to her making. And the forms sing with grace.
I read a piece recently explaining the principles in the brain behind this kind of process but it is not my language so I cannot employ it here, lacking the medical/neurological frames. But in my artistic life I would call it seeing empty spaces.
If you get the book you can see what I mean. For it dances.

I especially enjoy the fact this story of a young artist is rich with text, long really and full of illustrations. Maybe a bit too much in over presenting its case.....But it gives a sense of how she thinks with her brush. The simplicity of her life, lack of need for "things" as a child, the power of her performance over the illusions of ownership and collection....in this way I also think the book speaks to parents, teachers and those involved with our young people about the value in "doing".
Clearly her family very early facilitated and encouraged her.

She has paper, brushes, inks, paints, a life where her father states he gave her big paper , " This has helped my daughter overcome timidness in painting and become bold." I can relate to this, having been shy and finding art a way to relate. When my middle daughter at three became interested in dance....we got her lovely dance.....but always in my mind was this would be how I would name to her the shyness. Not as a disability...sure you are sometimes reticent to speak, but you are a dancer and they speak with their bodies.
For a dancer the way of silence is chosen. A path.

It is with your movement we will know you. And, it did work. Worked to encourage her to have boldness and expression....to push out. And now nearly grown...I find her strength of character free of the label of "shy kid". Though she remains a person who speaks with arts often over language. So there is wisdom here in this book. Wisdom I took into my parenting.

This auto biography addresses her more adult relationship to making. I actually thought of it after reading a book, The Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin about his adult relationship to his playing chess.
Fame for both of these children is something that does come to be a part of the dynamic, to be dealt with, and Yani talks to this...as well as us seeing the strong relationship her father plays in her life and art. That's remarkable too.

When my children were born I did realize that the "father" seemed to play more physical role. He'd "do ' things. Things I often felt compelled to stop. I look at a mamma cat and see myself. There was their Dad lifting them through space, chasing, tumbling, laughing. There was i, limiting, controlling, yapping, stopping.....hum. And then I understood one day in our roles he really was the force to connect them to doing, to the outside world. He represented the activation.

I hear this in the book, again. Her father is essential...he encourages her, questions her, stresses, supports, notices, gets the supplies, frames the experiences with his insights. He intellectualizes as well. He was the painter she followed. And somehow from this I felt the book was a powerful story to a father about how they are such a model for children of the life force, the learning force. If a father loves music, his work, literature, libraries, cars, trains, art...I think their active presence in taking the child into these worlds is beyond measure in it's value to the development of a child. Just look at Yani.

And I need to say one more thing....this is not to diminish the role of mother. I know what this does too and no one can ever diminish this....but as a mother I realized finally I had to allow this to happen free of my chatter, or correction. The best gift is allowing their relationship. Not too much is said of Yani's mom. I think I do understand why. Clearly by her absence her the power of her presence is still felt. I notice this.

This book is good too for info about brush painting, supplies, maps, and actual photo's and info so you can see this artist over all her years. As we know...' a picture is worth a thousand words...' Though it is great to read to students, following it with large paintings of the jungles replete with monkeys and animals in giant paintings....that's what I'm talking about.....my class paints with fresh paint. Yum...

Yani is described as a national treasure. Children are this. By learning from what was a natural process of the child, what evolved in the story of this artist , we can learn to parent, teach and evolve our relating to children. Please take time to reach for this book. Share it with children.

I end with this quote...her father says,

"When Yani was painting, I would pretend not to know anything about what she was after", said Wang Shiqiang." Everytime she would finish a painting, I would ask her why it was painted in that certain way; for example, why there. Yani would never stead she would think about what I had asked." He added that if their es, he would just say "I don't neccessarily agree with you.' Sometimes, when Yani's painting did not make sense to him, he would praise her on purpose andeven say, "It's wonderful." Then Yani would keep on painting enthusiastically, until she herself realized what a mess she had made.

As someone who feigns much of my teaching days....it made me laugh.

I thought...my mom's thinking...time to say less.
And watch.