sentinel eyes

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
                                                                                                      ------ Pablo Picasso


“There is no other reason for drawing than the awareness of the eye awakening from its half-sleep. There is - I am convinced - no other good reason for art, all the art-popes and theories notwithstanding...”
                                                                                                          ------Frederick Franck

by david, age 5

I want to preface my affirming remarks about children and attentiveness with a disclaimer.

Armed with ample and credible personal experience I have maintained and often verbally proclaimed my cynicism about kids and those who tout their inherent loveliness and innocence. After a few short months they seem to adopt multiple behaviors that make them less than desirable dinner companions or fellow shoppers…certainly a hindrance to progress in the studio.


But with the weight (and the glory) of intimate years with small children behind me, it is easier now to see them in an unprejudiced light and to even learn from them something of what we easily abandon as we accumulate years. John Taylor says it skillfully---


Over the swinging parapet of my arm
Your sentinel eyes lean gazing, Hugely alert
In the pale unfinished clay of your infant face,
They drink light from this candle on the tree.
Drinking, not pondering, each bright thing you see,
You make it yours without analysis
And, stopping down the aperture of thought
To a fine pinhole, you are filled with flame….


In a life drawing class in Santa Fe earlier this month I was standing before a large blank page preparing to draw. Zeus, our model, was nude and in a prone position directly in front of me readied for a 30 minute pose. Barry Moser, our instructor, explained how he wanted us to approach the drawing: “Go ahead, be a voyeur for now. Take time to look at Zeus with care. Look at him as you would look at one you loved. Examine the folds, the curvatures, the light and shadow. Quiet the mind of distractions and simply gaze at him.”


Most of us do not default to this kind of seeing. It is weird. Quiet gazing is an anomaly to most of us over five. “Drinking” what is in front of us without naming, judging, or analyzing is something small children do well. Seeing well is a return to the child-gaze and alertness that energizes us as artists, as humans, “letting go of what we know to honor what exists.”(paraphrase of David Bazan’s lyrics).