Children and Folk Arts

Art is not only what we are generally taught and used to see and consider as art... Art is often defined by the technics developped in our western civilization since the Renaissance...I have seen  parents coming to my studio with the expectation that their five years old child is going to learn about perspective, shadows, some basic rules to develop their representational skills as early as possible... and this is not exactly what I propose for them at this age. I will explain in another posting why I don't start to teach figurative drawing and more "academic" technics before age 7. What I can tell you now is, that children under this age have this ability to see the world and express it in a very unique way and I just want to help them to do that the best they can. The way the perceive the world and choose to express it in an art project is often very close to folk arts, primitive arts, "Art brut", or the art of ancient or existing cultures which are inspired by their own beliefs...very different from the productions of our "rational" and intellectual civilization. African masks, pre columbian patterns, cave arts,  native american Kachinas puppets, street arts, folk arts are Art too... just like a painting of MichelAngelo. And young children usually like these forms of arts, they feel close to them and they have a lot to learn from them. That is why we sometimes create puppets, masks, or assemblages of repurposed materials and why I let the youngest children draw people or nature as they see it, just helping them to elaborate, ornamente their work, and develop new technics ...inside their own self-expression.