0214blog

Childish Passions

When I was 8 years old I loved to draw, whether it was copying the big “S” on Superman or getting Popeye’s mouth and pipe just right or Donald Duck with his hat tilted perfectly. There was a gratification in reproducing something that I had seen in a comic book or on television and it was a passion that I have been unable to reproduce, except for baseball. In many ways, my life has been a constant often unsatisfactory journey to find and pursue my passion and it is not easy.

I watched “Learn To Draw with Jon Gnagy” religiously on the television and was fascinated with his lessons as he took you step by step to explain perspective and shading and drawing the human face. He looked like an artist, with his goatee and trademark flannel shirt and he made art fun and educational and I swear he was talking directly to me. The show included a series of 15 minute drawing lessons and it aired from 1950 to 1955, meaning that I was 6 years old, at the oldest, when I was mesmerized and utterly engrossed by the show. And what a wonderful feeling that was.

Nobody made me draw, nobody made me take art lessons or to work hard to refine my skills, I found it myself and I did it because it was a joy, a way somehow to express myself and in plain words, it was fun. And how I value such passion, it makes one feel alive and special and to be able to step into another world, to be totally immersed, even briefly, is like taking a journey to a new place with new adventures and realizing that you are valuable and that you have every right to visit that new world, regardless of where it might be or how long it may take to get there.

And then I stopped drawing and I don’t know why, maybe I got more interested in baseball or maybe I didn’t feel that I had much talent at drawing. Maybe I didn’t get enough guidance and feedback and I interpreted a lack of adulation as a message that I was not very talented and ought to move on to other childish pursuits. How do you know when it’s just a phase or possibly something real and worth pursuing but that really begs the question of whether anything has intrinsic value or is it all subjective and about internal reactions.

And what was I being compared with, I certainly was no Van Gogh nor was I in line to be the next Stan Lee, but I had some talent and I’ll never know if it could have gone much further. And that’s part of the difficulty in stimulating a child’s interest, it should have very little to do with some subjective talent ranking but rather with how the child feels abut whatever pursuit he chooses. It has everything to do with conveying the message to the child that he or she is special and unique and can express his abilities in any way that he or she wants, as long as others aren’t harmed.

After my brief fling at drawing, baseball was the closest I came to feeling that joy and freedom of drawing and I remember inhaling books about baseball, I studied baseball history, the teams and the players and mimicked the batting stances of my heroes, I even learned to spit like Mickey Mantle. I was engrossed in the baseball world and somehow that felt almost as gratifying as my drawing, somehow it helped me make sense of my life. But then as I got older, my love of baseball changed and I internalized a message that such pursuits, such passion, like drawing, were for children and that I should move on to more adult matters.

The problem with nurturing creativity in children is that there is no simple answer. I would show my drawings to my mother and she would praise them, kind of, but not really paying much attention, even though I thought I was some kind of genius at drawing. Had she done more to promote this blossoming skill, maybe I would have continued with a life in art or maybe there was nothing anyone could have said to get me to pay more attention to art. To me, my drawing was play and that probably was how others saw it, something juvenile, a phase to pass through.

There is a fine line between encouraging a child and pushing him in a direction that he may not want to go and a parent has to be aware of his or her own selfish motivations in moving a child in one direction or another. Think of the parent whose child shows uncanny abilities to hit a baseball and the parent dreams of seeing his child on a Major League baseball team and it is all about the parent and one day the child is a Major Leaguer but the joy is gone in flames of pressure.

I took up painting briefly as an adult but it never went very far because I did not think my work was very good and because I couldn’t ignite anything like the childish joy I felt drawing Superman’s “S.” I knew an artist, his name was Bill Sturm, and he had retired as a chemistry teacher to become a full-time artist which he pursued with a child-like passion and I envied Bill. He may be the only person I have known who showed an indomitable passion that he pursued out of pure joy. Bill made some money from his paintings but he wasn’t wealthy and still every morning, at 5 a.m., he ventured to the studio in his garage and painted until 8 a.m., when it was time for breakfast, often returning later in the day for more of his joyful painting.

Finding a passion is a difficult, often lonely, pursuit and it takes a belief in one’s self and the energy to be single-minded regardless of the opinions of others. I do believe that frame of mind can be fertilized from the time a child is young and the rewards will be vast. Too many times, a person’s passion is minimized and compared with other things, like work, unless the passion produces positive effects, like money.

So when I take time out for my passion, I should be careful not to allow it to take too much of my time.