"Papa Nie's Thinking Outside the Box":
Don't constrain children's habit of free imagination.
The natural instinct and skills that people are born with are often insufficient in modern life, so everyone must learn and receive certain "skill training" at a certain age. Good habits are the easiest to develop in childhood, and developing a good habit will benefit a great deal in life. I am a school-trained art teacher living in a modern time. The old-fashioned method of education usually practices learning by imitation, that is to believe imitating the work of a master is a good way of learning the techniques of the master. If the copied painting turns out to be better than the original master's work, the student will often get a compliment such as "The pupil surpasses the teacher ..."
In my 30 years of teaching painting and creating my own artworks, I found that although the old-fashioned methodology of teaching art is very safe or even effective, it has a "fatal" disadvantage, which hampers people's creativity.
The Chinese often advise people not to make up something out of nothing. In fact, this is not the issue we need to worry too much about, because it is not practically possible to complete something that is created out of nothing. What we should pay attention to is how to cultivate more talents who can create and invent. If we want our next generation to have more innovative people, should we pay attention to avoid that children's imagination is limited to finite graphics in their early childhood curriculum? If I, as a teacher, ask a child to copy my painting, does this method inadvertently make the child develop a habit of just copying and not wanting to invent?
I am a painter who makes a living by creating paintings. If I can only copy other people's artwork, then I may literally become no more than "a copy machine." If you want to ask me, how do I create my own works "out of nothing"? My answer is that it is not really "out of nothing," when I was studying in a graduate school of Fine Arts, I understood the meaning of a nonobjective painting, and I have become good at developing images of concrete objects from these non-representational color blocks.
My four-year-old granddaughter and two-year-old grandson both like to paint, I don’t let them first copy from my paintings, but encourage them to play freely on their canvases.
