Child's play spills into the art world

By Kafil Yamin

BANDUNG (JP): It could be just like any other map of Europe except for one thing: Germany is pictured as a sweet, smiling face, cheering a brown-colored happy face representing Russia.

The painting represents 17-year-old German student Nelhuber Zanine's idea of a contest theme komm, spiel mit! (let's play).

Child's play? Not really. What Zanine has in mind is not merely fun, but a yearning for international and intercultural unity.

The painting's combination of strong colors makes Zanine's idea assertive. His European map is like a mosaic of various worlds. Not only does the painting succeed in representing komm, spiel mit, it succeeds in achieving a beauty that every artist seeks to create.

Another painting creates a more direct translation of playing, but with a strong artistic touch and skillfully drawn contours. Here, a boy is building a sand castle on a beach with his mother sitting next to him, staring at the stretching sea.

Patricia Bar, the painter, skillfully uses only blacks and whites in the picture, creating an overwhelming emotion: a colorless cheerfulness and pale silence that many unfortunate children may be going through.

A simple but artistically impressive expression of playing is also seen in a picture by Benedict Smuckh, a 13th grade primary school student, in which a nude boy is playing with water squirting out of a statue of a monster's head. For a fledging teen painter, Smuckh's composition of colors and lines deserve credit.

Except for one or two, an exhibition of children's paintings at the Bandung Goethe Institute from Sept. 19 to Oct. 19 show the typical characteristics of a child's world: strong coloring, blurring contours and inconsistent angle taking. Despite all of the shortcomings, however, viewers can sense the children's abundant wealth of beauty.

Psychologically speaking, the children's "shortcomings" in contour drawing may stem from the undifferentiated way they perceive the world and their environment.

"The children have yet to vividly distinguish between the imaginative world and reality; the characters of other living creatures with those of humans. Children see the world as one entity," said Iwenk, a drawing mentor at the Bandung-based Sos Kinderdorf.

That point of view similarly explains children's inconsistent angles of view.

"Children can see the world from various angles at a time. That's why they can make a picture of a landscape from a high viewpoint while at the same time you can see from beneath as well," he said.

Indeed, it would be unrealistic to expect an artistic painting from children since they do not perceive that they are producing art when they are drawing.

"Drawing for children is part of playing," said Volker Wolf, director of the Bandung Goethe Institute. "If some of their works in fact satisfy your sense of art, that only shows their potential."

Extraordinary potential can be found in many children's paintings. The reason, as German philosopher Sigmund Freud put it, is that: "In playing, children find possibilities of coping with negative experiences and satisfying wishes that cannot be met in real life."

In short, drawing is a means of cultivating children's intelligence, which includes artistic potential. Jean Piaget, a French philosopher, explained that: "In playing, children's processes of assimilation intensify."

What Peaget meant by process of assimilation is "playful activities that are repeated until children recognize the tenacity to accommodate themselves and develop it to higher stage".

Volker likened the role of drawing in developing children's personalities with that of music activities among American children. Recent research conducted in a number of American primary schools found that music activities help develop children's intelligence and their capacity of logical thinking.

The 30 children's paintings on display have won Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken Prizes, an international children's painting contest regularly held in Europe.

A similar contest was then held here among Indonesian children taking the topic Komm, spiel mit!. The results are encouraging for the rich imagination shown, despite the poor conditions many are living in due to the economic crisis.

The richness of children's imaginations can be seen in the limitless world spilled onto their drawing books. Here, no walls divide the logical and the illogical, reality and fantasy, or artistic norms and those falling outside the accepted.

Various interpretations can be viewed in the exhibition. Karno, a nine-year-old participant, put the topic in a picture of an adult holding hands with small kids in bed. "They're playing," he explained.

Others translated the idea in pictures of parks where children fly kites, swim, dive and run. They truly tell of a child's world where art, culture, politics and other adult focuses play no role.

As expressed in American singer George Benson's Greatest Love of All, Volker says the contest is a means of children "showing all the beauty they possess inside".