The Importance of the Arts
In Omaha this summer, we have had an outburst of public art in the form of a humaniod called J. Doe. Several local artists were given a large human figure and allowed to use their artistic expression on it as they saw fit. There are some very good ones, some very gaudy ones, and some pretty far out ones. My sons and I have had a good time with them, finding each one on a "J.Doe Map" and searching Omaha for them. The best part of it all is trying to decide what exactly the artist had on his or her mind when they created and then named their work. Even though the artist is not present at the time, their work and their title communicate to us a little bit of what is going on in the psyche of the artist, and we can compare/contrast what we think of that, or how we feel about that. Art is a great form of communication.
I remember when my eldest, Michael, was very small, and he had delayed speech. However, he was an excellent artist, putting great feeling and thought into his artwork to express the things he was experiencing. Oddly enough, as his speech improved, his art declined to where drawing stick figures is about as artistic as he gets. He has very little recollection of being able to draw so well, and is surprised when I get out some of his old drawings and show them to him. Art, for him, was as clearly an expression of his thoughts and feelings as if each stroke was a letter of the alphabet, or the sound of a spoken word. In spoken words, he was mute;in art, he found fluency.
For pre-language children, or reading-disabled children, art can help them to say what they truly mean. I see in some hospitals now, where there are pictures of frowning faces, for children to point and explain to the nurses how much pain they are in. For many years, psycologists have used art for children to express themselves, especially in times of trauma when words fail to work for children.
However, as a side note, sometimes this can also backfire. I remember one of my boys' teachers calling me, very concerned about my son. It seems he always colored all of his pictures in black crayon. The teacher knew at that time I was getting divorced, and she thought maybe my son was deeply depressed. The color black is supposed to represent that a child is suffering deep depression. I asked my son about it, and he said, "Mom, the black crayon is the only one I can reach without asking the dumb girls at my table for more crayons!" I bought him a separate box of crayons, and ta da, his "depression" was cured, overnight!
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