Here’s a very cool TED talk by Young-ha Kim on the little artist within all of us and how we need to keep in touch and encourage it.
I remember only encouragement from my parents. Sundays, my father and I would sit at the dining table, with (most likely) Swan Lake playing on the stereo, and us making water color masterpieces. At the time, nobody *ever* mentioned the fact that I kept drawing the same physically impossible landscape. A triangle mountain with a house at the tip, perfectly balanced. I don’t remember if I ever thought about how it would be to live there, every time you go on one room, somebody else would have to balance it in another room. Sounds like fun, but I’d never live there thank you. But I liked drawing it and I did.
Only now, 20 or so years after do my parents bring up my “masterpieces” and make light fun of it, but then again so do I. The funny thing is, about two years ago, I went to Brussels for a work meeting. As I entered the Brussels train station to leave Brussels for the day, someone was playing Swan Lake on the violin. Instantly, I was transported to a relaxed, warm Sunday afternoon of painting with the urge to listen to the whole of SL as soon as I got home.
I have not become a painter or an architect (thank goodness) from my Sunday painting sessions. But who can measure how else it has made me who I am?
Visions of Arcadia 