Recently, I had the opportunity to look after my great-niece for a week.   Since she likes to paint, we made a Father’s Day gift for her dad, my nephew.  While I had my own ideas about what she should paint, I soon discovered that she had her own ideas.

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She was insistent that she wanted to visit an art museum; however, in talking with her, I soon discovered that she thought the museum was a place where she’d get to display her own art, sort of a brick-and-mortar public-access cable channel.  After I showed her a video of an actual art museum, she was disabused of this notion and decided that such a trip could wait until later in her career.

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Lessons:               You have to believe in yourself.

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Don’t let the “common wisdom” deter you from your artistic freedom.

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Yielding to her six-year-old force majeure, I gave her some paints and paper and she immediately set out following her own vision.   When I asked what she was creating, she replied that it was a picture of the ocean and some fish, a topic with which she is very familiar having an avid fisherman for a father who enjoys her company on his expeditions.  She was amazingly accurate in showing the physical details of the various aquatic species.

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When I asked her about the colors she was using, she replied that she likes turquoise because “it has all the colors in the ocean.”  It was quite impressive to see in one so young that she could convey “the experience of the ocean” as she perceived it.

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Lesson:

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Don’t be afraid to use bold colors.

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She was using watercolors from my set, but I also gave her some gouache paint because it was an opaque paint that gave her the ability to paint over previous strokes.  Her style, it seemed, was to use bold colors with an overpainting.  It was a revitalizing experience to see her enthusiasm and uninhibited style.

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Lesson:                 Don’t let a canvas limit you.

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Instead of living with the frustration of running out of room, this mini-Matisse, presented me with the unfinished work and demanded that I append another sheet of paper to the edge of the one she had filled in.  This yielded a panoramic view of the ocean and fish that was 22 inches wide.  Some of the fish were shown swimming freely and others could only be glimpsed behind camouflaging seaweed.

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She had seen that many of my pictures had been framed by my husband, John, and asked if he would make one for her picture.  Naturally, he concurred.  What man can resist a six-year-old’s pleading eyes?

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That was my final lesson:            Promote yourself as best you can and make the work as appealing as possible.

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The overall thing that I learned from this experience was to be free… just be free.  Your spirit, desire and voice will come through.