Photo courtesy Flickr
My cat friend Tulip used to train her kittens by maiming a small rodent and letting the kids chase it. The process is ghastly, and I ended it every time I realized what was going on, but the main idea is a good one: learn from something real. My mother trained me as a baker by letting me play with bread dough on bake day. That was the original play dough.
I remembered Tuli last week when I was rooting through a graphics kit. A favorite critic told me that if he hasn’t used something in three days, he gets rid of it. That’s a little drastic for my purposes right now, but it often seems like a sensible strategy.
Subtracting from the kit generated a good grocery bag full of art paper with no future here; a full collection of dip pens, some dating back to the Forties; and miscellaneous low-tech studio accessories. I pass leftovers along to an eight-year-old buddy so he will recognize the gear if he ever gets interested in working with it. He likes to draw comics.
When Davie was seven, with his mother’s permission, he accepted a commission to do a small drawing of a topic I was interested in at the time. The concept has turned out to be strong and viable over the months since the piece arrived. Davie’s a regular kid, not an art class hot-house flower, and I consider him a team mate.
Recently I discovered that a barrista and I both have histories with hand-set type. Karl asked how I got interested in letters, and we shared a chuckle about my playing with my mother’s type catalogues. Those were rare resources in their day. Now anyone with a PC can bring up the whole history of type design with a couple of key strokes. Robert Bringhurst’s “Elements of Typographic Style” is the “Joy of Cooking” of digital typography. In type, we hold the living heart of Western art in our hands, and this brilliant low-tech recording medium is ours for the asking. Gutenberg used one size of one face, and he did pretty well.
At a winter party a couple of years ago, two lassies and two Barbies, all in Christmas dresses, held the high ground on the back of the sofa. I asked Megan what she wanted that year, and she said, “A shotgun.” Camping the next summer, she put dinner on the table with a lucky shot.
It’s important to respect a child’s impulse to reach out and touch things that attract her interest. One can always bring social training into the equation later. I think it’s a crime to slap a child’s wrist for reaching out: you might as well put out an eye as do that. Gentle restraint, sudden or otherwise, is far better, unless immediate safety is at stake. Workshops are very interesting to kids, and simply standing at a child’s side and enabling exploration will build the craft discipline of the future. In a shop, a child gets to be an adult, because the safety measures are serious ones, and respecting other workers is all-important. What might seem like draconian restraints in a family room are a welcome armature in an environment where the processes and products are truly exciting. Let a kid visit on the most rigorous terms until she’s too tired to follow the rules. Half an hour’s careful supervision will yield a lifetime’s self-respect.
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More after the jump.
