DAY FORTY EIGHT

Colouring inside the lines. 
 
Whatsapping with a youngster today, she proudly showed me her colouring book, and especially the page  where her teacher praised her for colouring inside the lines. I oohed and aahed appreciatively, as one always should.
 
Later on I started to wonder: what's so great about colouring inside the lines? The mundane answer is that it shows increasing mastery of hand-eye coordination and what in one of my old trades we called grapho-motor skills. Normal development, in other words. Why this should be deserving of such praise is a bit of a wonder, particularly as at some point the praise dries up; no one congratulates me on getting older and the concomitant normal stiffening of my joints.
 
Mundanity aside, I worry about the unspoken message being communicated in this situation. No doubt some would say the message concerns the necessity of taking care, or applying onself diligently to the task in hand, of taking pleasure in a job well done, (as a four year old). Others, though, might worry that something is being communicated about the need to conform, to not step outside of the path provided for you, to not create your own lines and patterns. That's what 'art' lessons are for.

I don't want to make too much of this, the little beasts have to be enculturated after all if they are to be even minimally bearable in later years, so a bit of confomity is probably a good thing. 

In any case there is another school of thought when it comes to creativity, one which from experience I tend to accept as valid, and that is that constraints are the things which promote creativity, not freedom. This can be thought of as constraints which create a problem which then needs to be solved, or constraints in the sense of rules which are to be obeyed and which therefore both impose a discipline on the maker, and simultaneously remove the need for unnecessary thought and decision making.  Constraints can remove distractions, freeing up thinking and other bandwith for creativity and making. Freedom, in the sense of a blank page or canvas (let alone a blank mind), can on th eother hand be a little terrifying if one isn't used to it.
 
Saying this is not to argue for conformity or unoriginality, but mainly to suggest one shoudn't always kick against rules and constraints or yearn for total freedom to do as one wishes. In the fields of arts, crafts and making, unless working on a commission or to a market, one is pretty free to do as one pleases in any case, though the results may not always be pleasing. 

Bottom line in all this: rules can be broken but don't always have to be, and colouring inside the lines can sometimes be a perfectly good way forward so long as it doesn't become a constraint.

Onwards...receptively.



Picture credit: Children Colouring in Ghana. Lauren Gardenbelle Fritts, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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