Viviane Schwarz

Author and Artist – Books and Games

Category: essays

  • Art is about to happen.

    Art is about to happen.

    About art materials and children

    Here are some children. Here is a basket of colourful pencils.

    Art is about to happen.

    The children know exactly what to do with this big basket of colourful pencils: dig with both hands. Dig right to the bottom.

    The rattle of pencils is the ritual that has to come before the concentrated frowning and the murmured incantations: This is a lion. This is a lion. This is a lion. This is a tree. This is a tree. This is a tree.

    Have you ever used one of those pencils?

    Did you think: it’s a wonder what a child’s imagination can do, I can’t draw a THING with this?

    No one can. We all tried. Some of us thought it was our fault and stopped trying.

    Those are fake pencils.

    The reason these children are digging through them with so much energy is because they are looking for one that works. They know to go for the shortest nubbins at the bottom of the box. Ignore the long ones, no one else got anything out of them.

    They are foraging, with great determination.

    Imagine what that determination could do.

    When a child makes art, it’s not a case of playing pretend. It’s not like playing brain surgery with a spoon and a pudding. It’s not like feeding a plastic doll. They are not playing artist. THEY ARE ACTUALLY MAKING ART.

    They use what they are given. They scratch faint lines, they rub puddles of chalky water across dissolving printer paper with splayed brushes. They powder fat snakes of glue with scales of confetti and glitter.

    What would happen if someone gave you a bowl of confetti and some glue and told you to make art?

    You might refuse. (I would.)

    Children are generally good-natured enough to at least give it a try. But even the most loving guardian and the children themselves may look at the result and find it hard to see if, in fact, somehow, art has happened.

    You stick it on the fridge, and you can tell what it is and everything… but is it art?

    Well, it’s creative.

    “Creative” often means “Wow, I’m glad I didn’t make that”.

    Would you ever wish you’d made something that a child made?

    Yeah… this is definitely very creative.

    Maybe one day, if those children keep being creative and try very hard, some of them might even become artists…

    But – who cares if they may be artists one day? What’s the point in telling them they may be artists one day if they work hard? What’s that got to do with anything? Is this whole confetti business some sort of test? Are we trying to trick them into law school or something?

    It simply doesn’t matter what they will be one day.

    Art is not just for artists. It’s for humans. It’s not a privilege. It’s a way to think with your hands (or your feet or your voice or your whole body, depending on the art, but we started with children and a basket of colour pencils, so pictures are trying to happen right now).

    Art lets you have a good look at your thoughts, and show them to the world if you want.

    You don’t need a license to make marks. You just need something that makes marks.

    The joy of making pictures is more than an act of imagination. It’s physical. Your gestures made visible and permanent, the marks you make, belong to you alone, like your own body. They come before communication, before expression: they are the basis of all those things.

    Give them things that leave marks. Try them out yourself. Are they enjoyable to use? Can you get a range of different marks out of them? Are they the marks you expected? Do they surprise you?

    In short, do you feel like you are making something – or do you just feel like you are using something up?

    Keep trying out materials. You’ll know them when you find them.

    You don’t need to buy whole sets of expensive tubes of paint – or sets of anything, or anything expensive. You don’t need many different colours. Every good piece of art material unlocks endless possibilities. By good I mean anything that readily creates or receives a mark, which may include beetroot juice or a particularly well-charred stick, and the lovely white rounded cards that are used to package tights. Do professional artists paint with their breakfast tea sometimes? Of course they do, if it’s nice and strong!

    Some good art materials command respect: you must wear clothes that you don’t mind staining, and you must handle them carefully. A bottle of red ink could spoil a whole carpet.

    You may be surprised how much respect children can show for a powerful substance like that. Being careful for a good reason is fun, and using something that requires your supervision is exciting and memorable.

    Those children like to see you deal with important substances, you know.

    Art materials often need some care. Brushes need to be washed and stored carefully. Maybe the children have pets, or toys that they care about. Can they look after those? Then they can look after their tools, if you teach them.

    You can give them a load of fake colourful toy paints that don’t make a mess because they don’t actually leave any traces at all – or you can let them make art.

    A real brush costs no more than a pack of toy ones. A box of decent watercolours costs more than a pound shop set – get one with fewer colours. Find some bright colours that mix well, and you’ll suddenly have a whole range. Or pick just one single colour, but one that leaves a mark. Get to know that colour. Ask that colour what it can do, and you will be surprised.

    By all means and of course: check if the paints are toxic. If they eat paint, they aren’t ready for paint that must not be eaten. But don’t underestimate them as they learn. If they can learn to deal with boiling water, and learn to deal with cleaning products, they can learn to deal with art materials. You’ll be there to help them with the messier ones, and find ones that are safe enough as long as the area is covered against smears and splashes.

    You may well find that as soon as they are actually making marks that are meaningful to them, the children won’t be anywhere near as messy as you fear because they won’t have to make up in dramatic performance and make-believe for what the material denies them in actual experience.

    They will WANT to make something beautiful rather than just have a play-time with colourful sticks that are better for throwing than drawing with.

    Maybe you don’t have a budget for art materials. Don’t forget about all the good stuff you can just use for free. If you have a pair of scissors and some paper glue, anything colourful in your paper recycling may be a collage picture waiting to happen. A felt-tip pen and some scrap paper is better than that whole basket of useless crayons.

    One last thing: Don’t just hand everything over to the children. Why should they have all the fun and education? Make some art together. And I mean: each make their own piece. If the materials work, you probably won’t need to help them to make it look good any more. Of course you can also collaborate on things, that’s part of the fun. But above all, respect each other’s art: you make your thing, they make theirs. You will find that you can teach one another a lot.

    It’s amazing what a child’s imagination can do – but don’t let them imagine that they can’t make art.

    Make those fake pencils into a tiny fence for a herd of amazing beasts painted with tea stains and thumb prints, pink highlighters and ink.

    Art is about to happen.

    Don’t miss out.

    This is a repost of an article I wrote some years ago.

  • The Best Place in the World

    The Best Place in the World

    A personal story about the importance of non-fiction books to a young child

    School, my father told me, was the best place in the world. It was where you learned about everything. My mother was a teacher then, and I envied all those children she went to see every day.

    I couldn’t wait.

    But I had to.

    Kindergarten was a tiny place just across from the hospital where my father worked. To me, it seemed vast. I couldn’t reach the doorbell, and I never dared to play on the looming slides and swings. I didn’t enjoy painting with water on blotting paper and watching it dry and disappear. I was frightened by the nonsensical clapping songs and I detested any sort of entertainment, especially the magician we went to see twice a year for a treat.

    Magic was a lie. The world was full of true wonders. I wanted to know them all, and invent new ones.

    I wanted to be in school.


    One day I had a fight with another child who insisted that whales breathed water, not air. That was the last straw. I’d already listened to her insisting that clouds were blue on a white sky, as in her drawings, because clouds were full of rain and the sky was empty, and that when the sky looked blue it was just covered in clouds.

    We were separated and I had to sit at a table across the room with a child who didn’t talk.

    “Did you know that whales breathe air?” I asked her. “They do.” She shook her head quietly. “Do you want to know more about whales?” I asked. She nodded. “I will tell you tomorrow,” I said.

    At home, I asked my mother about whales, and I concentrated hard to learn it all. My mother had a song she liked to sing about a whale called Jonathan who swims in the ice-cold Northern sea, and she told me that whales eat krill, which is all the tiniest things in the sea.

    The next day I couldn’t wait to see my new friend.

    “Welcome to school”, I said. “Whales are not really fish. They live in the ice-cold northern sea and they eat krill.”

    The next day, my class had doubled. Two silent children stared at me with awe, and all I had prepared was the subject of carrots. All I had learned about carrots was that you can eat them in a way that leaves a weird spiny core, and I had no idea why that was the case.

    “This was a short lesson, “ I said after my demonstration, “but tomorrow I will teach you about time.”

    At home, I went straight to the bookshelf. There was a whole row of non-fiction books, heavily illustrated, including “The How and Why Wonder Book of Time”. Time seemed an easier subject than for example dinosaurs, because there were many dinosaurs but only one time.

    I stared at the images of sundials and wondered if I could make one. I deciphered the words as well as I could.

    I had already learned to read by badgering everyone constantly to tell me what every bit of writing anywhere said, and once I realised that the word on the sugar packet was SUGAR I was off, reading first all the labels, then all the signs and finally all the books in my world.

    I wasn’t so good at talking yet. Sentences came out of my mouth in the wrong order, some sounds weren’t quite right and I wasn’t ever sure what other people actually knew about or what I had only dreamed.

    But I tried my best.

    “Welcome to school,” I said. “If you fall into a black hole in outer space, you keep falling forever. But you won’t, because you can’t fall upwards, that would be flying. Maybe we can make a clock, but I don’t know how. I’m sorry. I will find out more.”

    A short time later, we were told that we’d go to see the magician again. I started screaming and didn’t stop until they’d taken me out of kindergarten forever.

    From then on, I stayed home and read and drew and learned. I was happy that I didn’t need to waste any more time with clapping and water painting, and I was looking forward to starting school.

    It turned out that school meant sitting still and learning one letter at a time.

    The first day we all went “i”, which was the sound one might make sliding down a slide or stepping in a puddle, as the pictures illustrated. I leafed through the book and wondered what it was trying to teach me. It was all complete nonsense. There was no information at all, the pictures were lovely but was this really the only book we would be reading all year?

    Every day I went and wondered what was happening to me. There was a classroom library, but I wasn’t allowed to touch the books unless it was reading time, and reading time only happened when it rained at recess. Asking questions was bad. I drew animals and rockets all around the edges of my exercise book, telling myself there would be an end to every lesson. The first weekend, I hid under a chair at home and told everyone I lived there now. Soon after, I started having stomach aches and nightmares.

    I still dream about school and wake up sick.

    I’d forgotten about all of this until last week when I went to visit a friend who has a two year old daughter. At bedtime, there was a huge stack of story books to choose from, several of them written by me.

    She chose an illustrated French dictionary instead. “That’s her favourite”, my friend said.

    I watched them read together.

    My friend read out the words, asked questions and explained. Her daughter nodded to herself, whispering the names of animals, making claws and growls of lions not as make-believe but to remember: lion. It’s striking how grown-up tiny children look when they are learning something.

    It’s just as striking as the child-like joy of an adult who just worked something out… because in this, the most profound and life-important enjoyment, we remain the same.

    We all want to work things out.

    That child I was fighting in Kindergarten was reasoning out the nature of clouds as much as I was, and she really cared about whales.

    If the adults had taken notice and picked a few books off the shelf for us to look through together, our tiny self-teaching school would have grown and grown.

    They let us paint with water to save on paper when they should have let us mix colours.

    We could have made a sundial with the adults, right outside, right then, if they’d just asked us what we were doing instead of laughing at our seriousness.

    We sang clapping songs every day to keep in line when we could have sung about whales in the ice-cold northern ocean.

    And school…

    My dad was right. School should be the best place in the world.

    It wasn’t. There was no best place. But there were books.

    I love my job of writing and illustrating stories for children, but my first, true and most profound love will always be non-fiction books. If you write them, thank you.

    If you read them: welcome to school.

    Tomorrow we will build whatever you want, I hope.

    This is a repost of an article I first wrote in 2016.