But let's go back to one more drawing example.
The drawing entitled "Daddy is walking" is a statement of a small child, probably 6 years old, which expresses with sharp vividness the terror of the prison scene. The windows of the building are crooked, unevenly distributed, the risers are crooked, and a bunch of prisoners are non-individual puppets. It's all put together in a simple way, naive, even in the wrong form, yet it expresses with great expressiveness and in a comprehensive manner the intended theme. It is visible, that the whole terrifying experience of the child was reflected in the drawing, which shocked him, when he looked at his father in the camp. At the moment of this great experience, it perceived the details of the observed subject with such sharpness and with such force of sensation, that the whole image remained in his memory for a long time and could easily be rendered in a drawing. But what puzzles us the most, that this small child expressed the image of nature synthetically, as a unity of form and experience, eliminating all unnecessary. It transposed its experience into a play of visual contrasts placed in a clear interdependence. So it must have sensed the effects of contrasts, which it operated. And so the contrast of gray was created in the drawing, silent, the big sky and the vibrating surface of the whole area, a thick ornament of architectural details and a filigree grid of barbed wire, clusters of beaten prisoners and towering figures of individual soldiers.
All these moments are expressed with a dash, which changes its character and creates a living whole. During the creative act, unnecessary details were eliminated in the child's mind and a synthesis of the whole was created, and it also sensed the effect of all the pictorial contrasts of its image.
Painting titled "Scouts collect waste paper", and made by a 10-year-old girl, has great color advantages. Color patches are juxtaposed here with sophisticated accuracy. The blue of the sky shines, dark green grass, red roof, white paper and black dresses. These color contrasts were set with great decision. Every color is legible, laid flat and suggests space. Just like good contemporary painters. However, the overly schematic black outline and flesh-colored legs and face raise reservations. In these details, the features of childishness were lost in favor of too naturalistic treatment of human figures.
The painting titled "Autumn in a New Housing Estate" is composed in a strange grey-green range, against which small accents of vivid pink and yellow shine. So much expression and unique charm in it! Looking at this painting is hard to understand, how a child's creative imagination made this bold pictorial transposition, thanks to which the grayness of an ordinary housing estate turned into a charming fairy tale about this housing estate. Perhaps all family desires and longings related to the long wait for an apartment in a new housing estate were expressed here. Each form and each color speaks of the power of the original sensation, about the power of a great experience, expressed in the correct way by means of painting.
The image of a 9-year-old child is completely different, depicting a large human figure in the center with small men scattered around it. Extremely original and characteristic is the very way of placing lively and heavy color patches on a delicate gray background. The painting works with a decorative rhythm of the layout and a clear, decisive and sonorous set of color contrasts.
In the painting depicting a portrait of a girl in a blue dress, the colors are arranged in a sophisticated relationship. With warm, the gray background and the brown-gray patch of hair perfectly match the two cool colors, namely the blush of the face and the blue of the dress, emphasized with small hot accents, deep red ribbons and lips. Analyzing temperature contrasts, we have to admit, that they are set very deliberately. In this way, the mood of simplicity and delicacy was created in the painting, perfectly harmonizing with the chosen theme, not only through the shapes of the figures shown, but also through the same set of colors. The theme was simply felt and experienced, and its expression was formed by the little-known laws of speech of a living human being. And that needs to be emphasized as well, that the colored spots are located, in this case by an 11-year-old child, very well painted. They are perfectly flat, and suggest a third dimension thanks to well-chosen color sets. So they are, what is it called in professional language, flat-spatial.
A picture made by a 6-year-old boy with watercolors and colored pencils is extremely rich in ideas and in the accumulation of details. It's on topic, as well as in the form of drawings and in colors very childish and naive. It shows a flying large, yellow duck with red neck and blue wings, over which a purple plane flies. Below we see a green landscape with houses, ship to the right, and a helicopter above it. The way of placing the color spot is completely carefree and liberated from all fears, and the surface of the painting is exceptionally resonant thanks to the perfectly sensed painting values. They are also surprising and completely unexpected, such as a red cloud. The painting touches with the richness and dynamics of painting elements, their purity and nobility of sound.
A similar overall effect and similar dynamics of color can be found in the image of the same 6-year-old boy, made with oil paints on paper. Incredible violence of drastic colors, harmonized, however, in a bright and cheerful chord, he lives here on the principle of measured balance and proportions of intensity and size of color patches. It is visible, that the theme of the orange-purple vehicle, sailing on greenish waters cut by white waves, and striking the ultramarine blue of space, it's just an excuse for a child to get used to color issues. The violent juxtapositions seem to reflect the exclamation of a child's delight, discovering the wonder of color life.
Just as dynamic, albeit in a completely different range of colors, there is a picture of this 6-year-old boy, made with oil paints on paper. The black-ocher-blue-white range of the image is a completely closed chord, full of serious dramatic mood. The way of expressing form with color is full of exuberant immediacy, devoid of all pettiness and pedantry. From large forms, boldly implemented, an image with a completely unique dynamics and power of expression was created, obtained primarily through a set of colors.
Finally, the last example is an exceptionally beautiful and eloquent landscape of the same boy from 5 age. The size of the tempera painting is 50X70 cm. So it's a pretty big picture, painted with thick tempera. The form of trees, the sun, fumes, and also home is very simple, and even, you can say, bordering on incompetence. Nevertheless, the whole thing is fascinating.
The layout of the image itself is very simple: narrow level of gray foreground, then a narrower band of yellow in the foreground and a large clear sky is the background, on which the house is situated, two trees, black ship and flying black bomb with red fire spots. According to the above description, an infinite number of compositional solutions could be made, some of which would probably be wordless, therefore worthless, but part with expression and full value. That just proves it, that there is no room for planning in this matter, and the intensity of the experience decides everything. In this case it is deep, strong. The background colors are quite soft, especially in the blue color there are very small differences, while blacks and greens are drastic, even brutal, and yet they are included in the whole of the presented space and are connected with the whole in a beautiful-sounding chord. The enormous distance of the terrain and the infinite size of the sky were expressed with exceptionally simple means, shocking immeasurable space, on which stands a lonely human house and two trees. The windows of the house in their simplicity look at us almost like the eyes of a living being, and the black ship sails smoking, while from the heights of the sky comes a devastating fiery bomb.
There is no doubt, they are full of expression, very well composed images. Without a doubt, these kinds of coloring pages are astounding achievements, from which far-reaching conclusions can be drawn. These are not simple notes from nature or school studies of some "assigned" topic, but pictures, in which painting issues have been arranged in a subconscious and astonishing way, and they clearly express the personal experiences of living beings.
Can these kinds of paintings be made strictly according to plan?? NO, because survival cannot be planned. It can be born inside a person under the influence of external stimuli. The teacher can plan in general, but the child must create his own vision of the world and his own, creative, a unique image form.
The teacher can stimulate the child, it can embolden them and encourage them to repeat such attempts. Results, we discussed, can be achieved through creative work, however, exceed the possibilities of school "teaching". We're getting into the real world here, creative painting issues, which are subject to their own autonomous laws, and which cannot be limited or measured by any conventional and rigid schemes.
So that's not going to be important here, what can be planned and precisely defined in words, but this, what is achieved in the field of painting content, inexpressible, and possible to feel by people familiar with the matters of art.