The Roots Buried Beneath

Badilles, Christian Psalms R. (MWF 1:30-12:30 PM)

October 3, 2018

“The Roots Buried Beneath”

Children’s Artwork

When it comes to visual art, people tend to think of da Vinci’s paintings or the classical sculptures of Greece. People regard art as vibrant and aesthetic, pointing fingers at Picasso’s canvass; meaningful and though-provoking, remembering Dali’s satires and Van Gogh’s out-of-this-world masterpieces; or even exotic, imagining women of the indigenous tribes of Mindanao weaving abaca with the rhythm of the kulintang and dabakan at the background.  In short, visual art is generally seen as something that awakens the dormancy or curiosity of the human mind to a sense of awe. Without a doubt, they are the fruits and flowers offered in the gardens of visual art.

Nevertheless, as with every flower and fruit, there ought to be at least a piece of root that serves as the very fount of the plant; after all, without the roots, there is no plant, no flowers, no fruits. Buried deep beneath the pile of papers containing quizzes, books, notebooks, exams, and projects during the elementary years, we can see a handful of scratch papers, drawn with broken crayons and tooth-razored pencils with an image of a family standing happily on a green field with the sun smiling down on its subjects. Likewise, we can see a woman holding a stick pointing at a black board with the English alphabet written on it. These outputs were the only artworks we knew when the world was still so innocent to us.

 A child’s artwork is arguably unpopular in the professional visual art stage. As created by simple-minded beings, a child’s artwork is but a requirement given by preschool and grade school teachers or a past time for children to help them refrain from throwing tantrums and keep mothers busy with their household chores or daily gossips with neighbors. But in those curvy lines and disorganized figures, we can see a message─a message of hope and of the past, present and future. Indeed, there is something transcendental in those artworks, for how can we deem it simple-minded when an innocent child dreams for a happy and stable family? How can we consider it innocent for a child to dream big for his future?

It may be redundant to see these pieces of papers in school or at home as we either keep it inside an envelope only to be a cuisine for paper mites after ten years or a cuisine for the garbage can itself; but we just don’t know how these artworks mean for them, or should I say, how these artworks meant for us. After all, haven’t we come from childhood also? Is there anyone in this world who was born five feet tall? Didn’t we feel bad when our parents ignored the artworks we made when we were five years old? Hence, same goes for them, today’s children.

What is now the point of this art talk of mine? We can see two things in a child’s artwork. First, it is the starting point towards the professional visual arts stage. The next Juan Luna may be scribbling his crayons on a manila paper right now. Who knows? Not all can paint a da Vinci-styled output in the future and become a world-renowned painter, but a world-renowned painter can come from a child whose mind is only focusing on splashing and wasting watercolors on a crumpled oslo paper. When those days will come, they look back and give themselves a smile on how those crumpled and buried pieces of paper brought forth an abundance of inspiring sculptures and canvasses.