Picasso said something very, very similar. I'm going from memory here, since I can't find it. "I once painted like an old master, but only after many years of study could I paint like a child." That's not quite how the quote went, but it was something like that.
Attempts to find that quote brings up this other Picasso quote: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."
That is a true observation, and any artist who experiments with both realism and abstraction will run into it at some point. Adult-sight shows all these "realistic" details that are how things are really shaped, but you've got to learn how to see things like that. A lot of those are counterintuitive to learn, too, and it amounts to spending a lot of study to try and resemble a camera. Child-sight is how people *really* see, since only some portions of reality make their way into a person's brain, and those are often iconic. The parts that seem new or important seem larger than the rest. Child-sight is all about how things look in your brain rather than how they look in a camera. The irony is that you have to have worked hard on conveying adult-sight before you can really begin to convey child-sight as it really is.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-23 02:45 am (UTC)Attempts to find that quote brings up this other Picasso quote: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."
That is a true observation, and any artist who experiments with both realism and abstraction will run into it at some point. Adult-sight shows all these "realistic" details that are how things are really shaped, but you've got to learn how to see things like that. A lot of those are counterintuitive to learn, too, and it amounts to spending a lot of study to try and resemble a camera. Child-sight is how people *really* see, since only some portions of reality make their way into a person's brain, and those are often iconic. The parts that seem new or important seem larger than the rest. Child-sight is all about how things look in your brain rather than how they look in a camera. The irony is that you have to have worked hard on conveying adult-sight before you can really begin to convey child-sight as it really is.