The other day my friend's young daughter told her that "the kale is as big as the wind". I love the way small children leap over fences and boundaries in their minds to make fresh associations and comparisons. Their brains have not yet been fenced into separate sets of ideas, isolated rooms of thought, rigid pathways, halls of connecting fragments trapped in houses of ideas.
In another life I taught Kindergartners. I fit right into their free world of suggestion, imagination and innovative association. We were kindred spirits. The "kale" girl's mama is a poet. I am a painter. One of my sons is a musician, the other a sculptor. Different mediums but artists just the same. What is an artist but someone able to venture far into the abstract and away from conventional thought. Artists reorganize the world in new ways that spark recognition in other people and reflect the world back to them. Often artists provoke thoughts and questions that people do not realize they have. Artists use words/sound/images/objects to express things others don't know how to say. Picasso said, " It takes one a long time to become young." Is that what I am doing?
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