Photo by gustavo centurion on Unsplash
Even drawing stick figures has its benefits.
Source: Why ceasing to be creative is a mistake
By MATT DAVIS
- Many of us stop making art at a young age, convinced, perhaps, that we just don’t have the talent for it.
- This belief, however, may be wrong, and the benefits that producing art can bring aren’t contingent on talent.
- Is creating art an activity that all of us should pursue? Can artistic skill be taught?
When we think of life skills, we usually think of things like learning to cook, becoming financially literate, learning to de-escalate conflict, or cultivating our emotional intelligence. We don’t typically think of becoming better artists as a life skill. Indeed, artistic talent is seen as something innate — Some people are artists, and some people are not.
However, for those of us who profess to have no artistic talent whatsoever, it may be that cultivating this skill is even more important than for those who have, allegedly, “innate” artistic talent. So, is creating art a life skill? What kind of benefits can it bring? And, crucially, can it be taught, or is the act of creating something limited only to the lucky few?
Our innate love of art
In a cave in Indonesia, there are outlines of human hands traced in paint. To date, these tracings are the oldest example of art, dating back nearly 40,000 years ago. Human beings don’t consistently perform an activity for 40,000 unless its hardwired into us, and making art is something that is as human as communicating, laughing, or breathing air.
In an April interview with the Harvard Gazette, Dr. Ellen Winner, a psychologist who has studied art, said:
“My best guess is that art itself is not a direct product of natural selection, but is a byproduct of our bigger brains — which themselves evolved for survival reasons. Art is just something we cannot help but do. While we may not need art to survive, our lives would be entirely different without it. The arts are a way of making sense of and understanding ourselves and others, a form of meaning-making just as important as are the sciences.”
A sense of aesthetic appreciation is so innate in humans that we easily distinguish between and prefer abstract art created by a master (those paintings with, say, a few splotches of color that look like anybody could do it) over artificially generated copies or abstract works of art created by children and animals.
So, one big argument for pursuing your artistic capability is simply because it’s a natural, human thing to do. The odds are good you going to make something creative at some point, so why not develop that ability further? This in and of itself doesn’t serve as a particularly compelling reason, but there are plenty of benefits that producing art can bring.
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