We got a new student today, named Mikey. He's an energetic and intelligent 9 yr old~ and to mention TALENTED! I loved talking to him and we each drew a cougar, commenting on the shapes and their placement in relationship to the creature's face. We talked about siblings, school, church and parents. Whats so wonderful is the company of young artists and their imaginations! Active imaginations often leads to active bodies, however and patience wears thin with the slowness of art sometimes.
Watching him be hard on himself reminded me of whats so common to us all... we wonderful human beings have no patience for our learning process. We want to be able to mimic what an older, more experienced person does right now. (Oh, and was I ever just like that times 100.) But you know what? The learning part of art IS art, too. You're creating a creative person, a knowledgeable person. You learn what the teacher knows, add what other teachers know and then create new ideas from them... the mixture is something no one else could be.
So much of the art process has more to do with patience with yourself than anything else... but how to teach that to a child? OK, how to teach it to an adult, even? So much of the open-ness of learning is the ability to admit that its ok to not know something (and sometimes not know something for a long time, haha). Me? I spent 8 years in school doing art because I wanted to REALLY know my stuff when I got out. (But in all fairness, staying in college art for a long time is easy: the class length is much longer than regular classes and hard to go full time studio courses... especially if you're married or are a parent.)
My advice? Learn EVERYTHING you can as it can only help. Knowledge is power applies to artists, too :)
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