joasakura:

bogleech:

bogleech:

gothvegas:

fleetwoodbrak:

I thought there would be some twist to this article but no it was really just as mean and pretentious as it sounds

Oh my god who fucking wrote this

Everyone I know treasures what they drew as children once they’re all grown up and is glad if their family hung onto it

The final lines just viscerally disgust me here:

“
There’s a point, perhaps around the age of 7, when memory takes over and
a self-history starts, where children themselves decide what’s
important to them and what isn’t. Of course, you shouldn’t throw
something away that your kids say they want to keep. But absent that
urge, and particularly in the early years before it develops, most
children’s art exists to be destroyed.

“

For one thing, who the F U C K thinks children only becomes conscious of themselves and forming solid memories after seven years old?! Shouldn’t you be able to remember at least ages 3-5 like you can any other period in your life??

Second, the things created before that period are still probably the most important and amazing of all. Those are the relics of what your brain was like when it was brand new. I can’t think of many things more special to a human life than the window that offers.

Man. After my folks passed away and I cleaned out the old house, I would have to stop every now and then and cry because I found an ancient drawing I did that they couldn’t bear to part with.

The art i did meant so much to them, and after they died it was a gift back to me to remind me of their love.

Fuck this article.

Fuck this article. It brought tears of anger to my eyes. My daughter painted a flower when she was four years old, and I took down a huge, expensive picture hanging over the couch to put the flower up and it’s going to stay there as long as I can keep it there.

I have folders in my filing cabinet sorting her art by year. She draws pretty much every day, so we haven’t kept all of it, but I do keep the greatest hits, and I always will. Every time I do spring cleaning or clear out the files, I always flip through the art pieces and I love them. They’re all meaningful.

I didn’t become an artist by any stretch of the imagination because I discovered that writing was a favored way of spending my creative time when I was young, but when we moved houses in high school, my mom had a deep drawer in her bedroom with all the pictures my sister and I drew until we moved on to other hobbies. She even had stories I’d written for school. All kinds of stuff.

People like the author of that article have missed the point entirely. They’re judging something for the whole wrong reason. Judging it by adult art standards or some trite shit. Kids don’t make art for it to be seen, necessarily. They don’t do it for value. They do it because they want to and they think it’s fun. They do it because it has meaning to them, and thus value to the parent. It doesn’t matter if they draw the same hotdog looking cat a hundred times and you’re “tired of looking at it.” It goes on the fridge and it goes in a folder because it’s the total opposite of “pitiful,” or “empty of meaning.” It has all the meaning in the world to the people who love the creator of it more than anything. Especially if the child keeps drawing as a hobby forever because that child can look back and see the very beginning of their joy for creating. But even if they don’t, like I didn’t, nothing is devalued. To this day, more than 20 years ago, I still remember sitting on the floor in my mom’s bedroom shuffling through those pictures I drew in kindergarten, and how much love I felt from her having kept them for no other reason than because I made them.